Skip to content

The danger of political fashion

A damning report into baby deaths and appalling treatment of mothers at a Midlands maternity unit has condemned an obsession with ‘natural births’ which led it to refuse women cesarean sections.

This idea of natural childbirth being better is indeed a political fashion. And so babies die.

15 thoughts on “The danger of political fashion”

  1. Caesarean goes in and out of fashion as quickly as hemlines change and floral prints briefly become the new black?

    Oh my word! You don’t say!

  2. Midwifery seems to have fallen to the feminists.

    A friend of mine’s wife was in labour and the midwife was wittering on about some ‘natural birth’ BS, so his wife asked her: ” Have you got children?”, to which the midwife replied:” No.” His wife immediately said: ” Then shut the f**k up and give me the gas and air…”

  3. Envy of the world kills many people yet again. Wait until the real deaths due to lack of medical treatment due to CV19 excuses finally leak out.

  4. Whenever private health cocks up, it’s ‘proof’ that “evil nasty capitalist profit motive”.

    Whenever the NHS cocks up it’s ‘proof’ that “more money needed for NHS”.

  5. MrKing,

    The lockdown deaths (all premeditated murders by every politician that has ever voted for any of these measures), that will probably exceed corona deaths by an order of magnitude, will be a very long tail that merely establishes a new baseline. It won’t be possible to identify very many deaths as lockdown murders, let alone to exaggerate their number in the fraudulent way that natural deaths of coronavirus are being.

  6. @ Tim
    The idea of natural childbirth *always* being better is indeed a political fashion. [One not endorsed by the National Childbirth Trust which advocates natural childbirth but recognises that there are cases where an alternative is necessary or better].
    Tens of thousands of years of natural selection has led to a situation where natural childbirth works nearly always for most women but there are always a minority of cases where it doesn’t.

  7. A friend gave birth in a Parisian hospital. After a successful (non surgical) birth she was given exercises to do, with diagrams, the doctor saying in english “for your husband”

  8. Hallowed,

    Congratulations on the addition to your family! Did it take 12 or 24 weeks for your wife’s privates to return to your prior expectations?

  9. There is (or at least was 15 years ago) a huge divide between the midwives (natural childbirth fanatics) and the doctors (get her up on the operating table and we’ll cut the little bugger out). Even the female doctors were keen to do caesareans.

    My abiding memory of all of this was of my wife lying a trolley, waiting for a porter to wheel her down to the operating theatre, while the midwife crouched between her legs shouting “come on dear, one more push, you can do it” and claiming she could see the little blighter. Utter shambles from the Envy of the World (TM). And they knew it was a shambles because half way through they sent a lawyer in to take notes of everything in case something went wrong and we sued.

  10. Tens of thousands of years of natural selection has led to a situation where natural childbirth works nearly always for most women

    That may be getting less and less true.

    Because each generation that would have died in childbirth now survives, the following generations are increasingly having more issues. This is compounded by the far less active lifestyles modern women have.

    My daughters had heads too big to come out naturally. Likely they and my wife would have died trying in the old days. But now when my daughters give birth, there is a major chance that their babies’ heads will be too big and they will have the same spurs on the birth canal.

    We have the same issues with teeth, where a system that was honed by natural selection struggles with modern dentistry and nutrition keeping people’s teeth largely in their mouths. And so almost everyone now has to have their wisdom teeth pulled.

  11. By the by, when people start to spout about “natural” childbirth and “natural” ways in general, I ask them if they only use natural dentistry methods.

    I’ve yet to meet a person who volunteers to treat their teeth naturally. They all use painkillers too when having dental treatment, even though the pain is both short in duration and not that bad (I decline to have injections for fillings, so I know how much it hurts).

    Revealed preference and all that. They aren’t really that into natural.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *