11/06/2025
The worst test in medicine. (No paywall)
We knew all this 30 years ago, maybe more. But does anyone in charge seem to care?
Will apologies be issued to the tens of millions of women who endured unnecessary cesareans? And their babies, who were denied the normal biological experience and programming blueprint of being born through their pelvis?
Major lifelong consequences for them both, physically and emotionally. Ignored.
I have been attending births for 30 years. I often give people the benefit of the doubt. Recently, I experienced another wake up call hearing OBs talk about their fear of being sued and how it’s their right to muscle a woman into their preferred course of action/various intervention/cesareans to “cover their ass.”
Providers are *very* adept and comfortable and stealthy in disguising their fear of lawsuits with pressure/scare tactics, bogus justifications of safety, inciting fear with irrelevant statistics, etc.
Even as a seasoned provider, I lose sight of the very primal fear that is underlying so much of what providers believe and say and do. Vulnerable pregnant women are the last ones who should be navigating this minefield.
And in defense of doctors, I completely understand where they are coming from. One lawsuit for a poor outcome they may or may not have had any influence over can end their career and bankrupt them. One. This is a catastrophic context in which to help women give birth.
This NYTs piece didn’t even get into all the domino effects of unnecessary monitoring— that women cannot walk around normally as they would in labor, can’t squat, get in the shower or do any of the things mammal mothers instinctively do to bring their babies down. Can’t do any of that tethered by cords to a machine. Can’t even move normally with wireless monitors or intermittent monitoring because the monitoring trumps all else. The strip is king.
It’s a systemwide failure, driven by profiteering, the insurance racket, failed understanding of normal human mammalian maternal and infant physiology, disinterest in women’s rights of passage, indifference to breastfeeding, ignorance of postpartum and newborn neuroscience and attachment. I mean it goes on and on.
So how do we disentangle all of the above from a modern woman’s experience trying to have a healthy and happy birth and mothering?
We have to start by going back to the roots of humanized care. Midwives carrying for low risk women should be the default.
Say no to induction. No to pitocin in labor. Get the machines and the beeping and the fluorescent lights out of the birth rooms. Returning to sacredness, to the intimacy of birth, to oxytocin, to family, to grounding in mother and baby primal needs. Privacy. Closeness. Connection. Love….This is available to most women. We must stop lying to them.
Turn off the ***$ing machines!
An excellent article today from . Note the lack of evidence supporting the use of continuous fetal monitoring, the clear influence of business and economics, and the money grab from AI companies who claim studies support their product - when in fact they don’t - resulting in remote monitoring hubs.
I especially love that placenta accreta is described early in the article so the public can see that cesareans carry risk. As a result, we need to ensure that they occur only when needed or wanted.
Note that the photo for this article is of a remote monitoring hub. One such hub is up to 60 miles away from the hospital in which the woman is laboring.
“Nearly every woman who gives birth in an American hospital is strapped with a belt of sensors to track the baby’s heartbeat. If the pattern is deemed abnormal — too slow, for example — doctors often call for an emergency C-section.
But this round-the-clock monitoring, the most common obstetric procedure in the country, rarely helps baby or mother. Decades of research have shown that the tool does not reliably predict fetal distress. In fact, experts say, it leads to many unnecessary surgeries as doctors overreact to its ever-changing readouts.
The obstetrics field has long ignored these problems. Now, it’s putting more trust than ever on the flawed technology, often prioritizing business and legal concerns ahead of what’s best for patients, The New York Times found.
This fall, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists updated its guidelines on continuous monitoring, sanctioning it even as some other wealthy countries have cautioned against its routine use…
All three remote hubs, along with 400 other hospitals around the country, use A.I. software to help analyze the heart data. The software’s maker, PeriGen, has claimed on its website that 50 studies backed up its products.
But none of the studies found that the technology improved birth outcomes. PeriGen removed the list of studies after an inquiry from The Times. The company’s chief executive, Matthew Sappern, acknowledged that no clinical trials had shown benefits.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/health/electronic-fetal-monitoring-c-sections.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zE8.145f.FPhFANzFoVZp&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
