As a college student in the late 80's I had to do a paper on a chosen subject in a human sexuality course. I chose birth in America. One of the best books I discovered was Birth as an American Rite of Passage By Robbie Davis-Floyd. This was, at the time and may be still, the most fact driven account of cause and effect of how labor and birth go dangerously wrong. It documented every complication and connected it to "labor/birth management". As this article says, this mismanagement, aka mother and baby abuse is all to bill insurance companies to keep the abuse based profit rolling in as one unnecessary interventions leads to another that leads to a slippery slope of abusive, unnecessary interventions inflicted on Mom and baby. The only way most women can cope with the trauma they and their babies experienced is to convince themselves that it was a good thing they were in the hospital because they or their baby would have died if they were anywhere else. Women, take back your sovereign power and do your research and connect to your home birth community. Over the years when women found out I've had three healthy, sacred, safe home births I would hear this response, "Oh, I wanted a home birth too but my husband wouldn't agree." Well, mine didn't either. He said, "Just so you know, if anything at all goes wrong I would never forgive you." OK. I did my research. I trusted my health before I became pregnant and during my pregnancy and learned that most of the list of things that do go wrong are tied to unnecessary medical mismanagement, aka abuse for profit. I also came to the reality that sometimes things do go wrong. Life isn't without risks. That's why you build a team of women who have experience in the birth process, and people that you trust to support you and baby during this miraculous time and event. The system will not change. We are the change.
Our md that we connected to in 1969 for advice was a doctor from England who together with his wife (a midwife) had delivered over three thousand babies pleaded with us to have the child in a hospital in Canada. The reason being that he was terrified by one case where the mother haemorrhaged. The part of the story he could not comprehend was that he failed to save the woman from dying even in the hospital with access to emergency procedures Taking personal responsibility sometimes is hard but outshines other options completely. Thank you for staying the course and communicating to others the beauty!
“The only way most women can cope with the trauma they and their babies experienced is to convince themselves that it was a good thing they were in the hospital because they or their baby would have died if they were anywhere else.”
The medical system gaslights its patients like this all the time. To convince to begin a medication, treatment, or procedure, they say, “You will certainly suffer or die without it.” And when something goes wrong, they say, “It would have been worse…”
Thank you for this comprehensive list of assaults on women and babies during their most vulnerable time in life. We worked hard to anticipate and avoid as many interventions as possible with the planned home birth-turned-hospital birth of our oldest, but got caught off guard by the hearing test required by the state before we could take her home. We agreed to it because although it seemed ridiculous, it was not invasive. She failed it. Of course she failed it, I thought—hadn’t her ears been full of amniotic fluid for months? So we were sent home with a fistful of brochures and resources for deaf children and an appointment with a pediatric specialist (which we cancelled when we got home). Other than a few bouts of selective hearing as a teenager when it came to chores, hearing was fine. In light of all this it gave me extraordinary pleasure that she went on to become one of the top musicians in the state in high school and has perfect pitch. The system has so many ways of entrapping you through fear if you don’t keep your wits about you.
Thank you for covering this. It was after my older sister lost her healthy baby boy at the hospital from a seemingly innocuous procedure, that I decided to never have a baby in the hospital. By the time she got to the hospital she was late in her labor. They popped her water bag and the cord came rushing out. There was no way to shove it back in as the baby's head started to crown through the cervix. This crimped the cord (like a hose folded) and held it that way through the remainder of the delivery, basically killing the baby this way, for lack of oxygen/blood-flow.
So yes, even the routine practice of popping the bag can KILL the baby.
‘Freebirth’ is currently defined as the deliberate decision to give birth without a regulated healthcare professional.
One Freebirthing friend told me that her baby ‘sat’ on her pelvis for 3 hours during her birthing process. “We kept checking the heartbeat and all was well. When the baby was ready, he came right out. If we had had a midwife with us, she would have insisted we transfer, (because descent was taking ‘too long’) and we would have entered into the System. I listened to my body and monitored the heartbeat and knew everything was OK.”
Until we all learn to love and trust ourselves, we will continue to be victims of Systems designed to dehumanize us.
Here's another one to add to your list: Blood sugar checks at every breastfeed for "large" babies. My first baby was born in a large women's hospital in a major city during May of 2020. She was 9lbs 3oz (the smallest of all my babies so far), but the hospital was in a panic since she was "huge" and "not keeping her blood sugar up". If they would have just left us alone and let her nurse whenever she wanted, I am sure her blood sugar would have been just fine. But instead they monitored her sugar every time she wanted to nurse with a heel prick, which just upset her and then she wouldn't feed nicely and I was so exhausted from the labor and a complete mess and a brand new breastfeeding mother who didn't have a clue how to help her latch. The lactation consultant saying "give the baby a sandwich" and then latching her for me was zero help. I kept telling the nurse that I was sure the baby was fine and if I could just nurse her more she would be fine in a few hours. But the nurse said if I didn't give her a bottle of formula and get her sugar up they would take her to the NICU. Her sugars were only barely low. So, she got her bottle of formula, the nurse got the blood sugar measurement she needed, and a half hour later I heard a gurgling noise as my baby vomited up all the formula, choking and gasping. Thank God a nurse walked right in right at that second and got her upright because I was so weak I couldn't move and my husband was finally snoozing. Then all the formula was gone, but it didn't matter because "her blood sugar was stable". It was so absurd. And the next time the nurse came back to check, my husband was very upset and asked her if she would like to be stabbed in the foot every time she wanted to eat and wouldn't the stress of that upset her blood sugar and prevent her from eating. And that was the last time they bothered us about that.
They also woke us, if felt like, every half hour. Knock knock, here for mommy, check, try and get some sleep. A half hour later. Knock Knock, here for baby, check, try and get some sleep. All night long after the most exhausting experience of my life.
Then, after we had finally been able to sleep a few hours, the same crabby blood sugar nurse came to give baby a bath, at 5AM because it was exactly 12 hours after birth and that was hospital policy. There is no sense in these hospital policies.
The next two babies were born at home. It was so peaceful. Everything that was awful about the hospital birth was perfect and peaceful at home.
Yes I believe pregnancy is now a racket when you have to be in the “system”. I wish I would have had a midwife years ago. The same can be said of hysterectomies. They are marketing those also to make money off of women. Now years later I’m suffering from a bad one gone wrong. I NEVER should have had it. Here’s the thing: the most profit driven commodity now is the human body in America sadly to say.
How we got here? Close your ears if your heart goes aflutter at talk of racial history...
from AI:
The campaign by the American Medical Association (AMA) to professionalize medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries directly undermined and replaced the tradition of original Black, or "Granny," midwives, contributing significantly to racial disparities in maternal health that persist today.
The tradition of original Black midwives.
o In the American South, Black "Granny" midwives were essential health care providers who drew upon ancestral knowledge passed down from Africa.
Highly respected community figures: During slavery and after Emancipation, they attended births for both Black and white women, providing compassionate and holistic care that addressed physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
o The primary source of care: In the rural South, they were often the only available health care professionals. By the 1940s, they attended up to 75% of births in the region.
o Superior outcomes: Early studies documented that midwife-attended births often had better maternal outcomes than hospital births.
The AMA's campaign against midwifery
As the medical field became professionalized in the mid-19th century, the AMA and other physician groups sought to eliminate midwives, especially Black and immigrant midwives, viewing them as competitors and "irregular practitioners".
o Exclusion from organized medicine: The AMA, founded in 1847, explicitly excluded Black doctors and women from membership.
o Systematic stigmatization: Physicians, such as influential obstetrician Dr. Joseph DeLee, launched public campaigns that demonized midwives and promoted hospital-based, medically managed childbirth as superior.
o Weaponizing regulation: Campaigns against midwives leveraged racist arguments to portray them as unscientific and unsafe. This laid the groundwork for policies like the 1910 Flexner Report, which set new standards for medical education and led to the closure of most Black medical schools, severely limiting the number of Black physicians.
o Discriminatory laws: In the 1920s, the Sheppard-Towner Act provided federal funding for maternal and child health programs that included midwifery training and regulation. However, states used new licensing requirements to phase out and delegitimize apprentice-trained traditional midwives, a change that disproportionately impacted Black and Indigenous midwives.
I have friends in the US who are quite wealthy and decided to do without health insurance because they can pay for anything out of pocket, and wouldn't it be easier to not deal with those guys. But they wanted to be in hospital just-in-case.
This was before Obamacare.
They avoided any medical care. But used the hospital room for a natural child birth. It took about 24 hours-- longer than expected but not outrageous.
The Bill? $57,000 USD. For the use of the room.
One thing they didn't know-- The hospital charges the uninsured 4x higher rates for everything, as part of their deal with the insurance companies "who get a substantial discount".
Including having unused equipment and staff hanging around.
I don't totally understand how or why this happened. Obviously it was a weird choice- but it exposed how the uninsured were mistreated.
My baby was born 3 wks early. My water broke within 2 hrs of having had a “regular” check in with my doctor who decided to do an internal exam to see how “far along I was”. That I believe was the cause of the water breaking, which created the “emergency” that now I needed to get to the hospital, where predictably I did not go into labour naturally and required oxytocin to induce labour, as now I was in the “danger zone” as too much time had passed. The whole thing was traumatic, I was stressed, my small baby developed jaundice, would not latch, was losing weight. I was in the hospital for 5 days which by the end I had to beg to be discharged. I had a small, colicky baby at home, not feeding well and eventually went to formula - which created feelings of failure and guilt. I actually have no recollection of whether I was told anything about Vit K shots or injections. I never wanted to get pregnant again after the whole experience and didn’t have anymore children which was not my original plan.
Our first child born at home miles by water from electricity was given a “I presume this is the child that the mother carried eight weeks ago”. Still a birth certificate was issued
You, whoever you are, are doing outstanding work, thank you. I'm an N.D. who delivered my own children. I was taught by Henry Bieler, M.D. and can share with you several ideas you are not including. First is the cause and treatment of nausea of pregnancy and toxemia of pregnancy. I also have another interpretation of vernix caseosa. Contact me at Health@CharleyCropley.com
I can tell you where the nausea and possibly much of the toxicity comes from….
Synthetic vitamins! The nausea from the synthetic prenatal vitamins (all vitamins are synthetic if they’re not directly from real food) was my personal experience. Just eat a balanced healthy diet and watch for synthetic vitamins added to food.
That's a great point on the prenatal vitamins. They are one factor in the larger context of "everything that poisons" which includes overeating which causes the excess to ferment and putrify, a "sick" microbiome, as well as poisoning thru the skin and respiratory tract (and mind) all of which burden the liver with detoxification and the liver which empties toxic bile into the duodenum creates nausea. I hope this comes across.
As a college student in the late 80's I had to do a paper on a chosen subject in a human sexuality course. I chose birth in America. One of the best books I discovered was Birth as an American Rite of Passage By Robbie Davis-Floyd. This was, at the time and may be still, the most fact driven account of cause and effect of how labor and birth go dangerously wrong. It documented every complication and connected it to "labor/birth management". As this article says, this mismanagement, aka mother and baby abuse is all to bill insurance companies to keep the abuse based profit rolling in as one unnecessary interventions leads to another that leads to a slippery slope of abusive, unnecessary interventions inflicted on Mom and baby. The only way most women can cope with the trauma they and their babies experienced is to convince themselves that it was a good thing they were in the hospital because they or their baby would have died if they were anywhere else. Women, take back your sovereign power and do your research and connect to your home birth community. Over the years when women found out I've had three healthy, sacred, safe home births I would hear this response, "Oh, I wanted a home birth too but my husband wouldn't agree." Well, mine didn't either. He said, "Just so you know, if anything at all goes wrong I would never forgive you." OK. I did my research. I trusted my health before I became pregnant and during my pregnancy and learned that most of the list of things that do go wrong are tied to unnecessary medical mismanagement, aka abuse for profit. I also came to the reality that sometimes things do go wrong. Life isn't without risks. That's why you build a team of women who have experience in the birth process, and people that you trust to support you and baby during this miraculous time and event. The system will not change. We are the change.
Our md that we connected to in 1969 for advice was a doctor from England who together with his wife (a midwife) had delivered over three thousand babies pleaded with us to have the child in a hospital in Canada. The reason being that he was terrified by one case where the mother haemorrhaged. The part of the story he could not comprehend was that he failed to save the woman from dying even in the hospital with access to emergency procedures Taking personal responsibility sometimes is hard but outshines other options completely. Thank you for staying the course and communicating to others the beauty!
“The only way most women can cope with the trauma they and their babies experienced is to convince themselves that it was a good thing they were in the hospital because they or their baby would have died if they were anywhere else.”
The medical system gaslights its patients like this all the time. To convince to begin a medication, treatment, or procedure, they say, “You will certainly suffer or die without it.” And when something goes wrong, they say, “It would have been worse…”
Thank you for this comprehensive list of assaults on women and babies during their most vulnerable time in life. We worked hard to anticipate and avoid as many interventions as possible with the planned home birth-turned-hospital birth of our oldest, but got caught off guard by the hearing test required by the state before we could take her home. We agreed to it because although it seemed ridiculous, it was not invasive. She failed it. Of course she failed it, I thought—hadn’t her ears been full of amniotic fluid for months? So we were sent home with a fistful of brochures and resources for deaf children and an appointment with a pediatric specialist (which we cancelled when we got home). Other than a few bouts of selective hearing as a teenager when it came to chores, hearing was fine. In light of all this it gave me extraordinary pleasure that she went on to become one of the top musicians in the state in high school and has perfect pitch. The system has so many ways of entrapping you through fear if you don’t keep your wits about you.
Thank you for covering this. It was after my older sister lost her healthy baby boy at the hospital from a seemingly innocuous procedure, that I decided to never have a baby in the hospital. By the time she got to the hospital she was late in her labor. They popped her water bag and the cord came rushing out. There was no way to shove it back in as the baby's head started to crown through the cervix. This crimped the cord (like a hose folded) and held it that way through the remainder of the delivery, basically killing the baby this way, for lack of oxygen/blood-flow.
So yes, even the routine practice of popping the bag can KILL the baby.
‘Freebirth’ is currently defined as the deliberate decision to give birth without a regulated healthcare professional.
One Freebirthing friend told me that her baby ‘sat’ on her pelvis for 3 hours during her birthing process. “We kept checking the heartbeat and all was well. When the baby was ready, he came right out. If we had had a midwife with us, she would have insisted we transfer, (because descent was taking ‘too long’) and we would have entered into the System. I listened to my body and monitored the heartbeat and knew everything was OK.”
Until we all learn to love and trust ourselves, we will continue to be victims of Systems designed to dehumanize us.
Here's another one to add to your list: Blood sugar checks at every breastfeed for "large" babies. My first baby was born in a large women's hospital in a major city during May of 2020. She was 9lbs 3oz (the smallest of all my babies so far), but the hospital was in a panic since she was "huge" and "not keeping her blood sugar up". If they would have just left us alone and let her nurse whenever she wanted, I am sure her blood sugar would have been just fine. But instead they monitored her sugar every time she wanted to nurse with a heel prick, which just upset her and then she wouldn't feed nicely and I was so exhausted from the labor and a complete mess and a brand new breastfeeding mother who didn't have a clue how to help her latch. The lactation consultant saying "give the baby a sandwich" and then latching her for me was zero help. I kept telling the nurse that I was sure the baby was fine and if I could just nurse her more she would be fine in a few hours. But the nurse said if I didn't give her a bottle of formula and get her sugar up they would take her to the NICU. Her sugars were only barely low. So, she got her bottle of formula, the nurse got the blood sugar measurement she needed, and a half hour later I heard a gurgling noise as my baby vomited up all the formula, choking and gasping. Thank God a nurse walked right in right at that second and got her upright because I was so weak I couldn't move and my husband was finally snoozing. Then all the formula was gone, but it didn't matter because "her blood sugar was stable". It was so absurd. And the next time the nurse came back to check, my husband was very upset and asked her if she would like to be stabbed in the foot every time she wanted to eat and wouldn't the stress of that upset her blood sugar and prevent her from eating. And that was the last time they bothered us about that.
They also woke us, if felt like, every half hour. Knock knock, here for mommy, check, try and get some sleep. A half hour later. Knock Knock, here for baby, check, try and get some sleep. All night long after the most exhausting experience of my life.
Then, after we had finally been able to sleep a few hours, the same crabby blood sugar nurse came to give baby a bath, at 5AM because it was exactly 12 hours after birth and that was hospital policy. There is no sense in these hospital policies.
The next two babies were born at home. It was so peaceful. Everything that was awful about the hospital birth was perfect and peaceful at home.
I love your husband's response to that stabby nurse!
Synchronicity. My post this morning has a similar theme:
https://eclectichealing.substack.com/p/i-skipped-my-annual-doctor-visits
The healthcare system has become parasitic. It's time to stop feeding the parasites!
Yes I believe pregnancy is now a racket when you have to be in the “system”. I wish I would have had a midwife years ago. The same can be said of hysterectomies. They are marketing those also to make money off of women. Now years later I’m suffering from a bad one gone wrong. I NEVER should have had it. Here’s the thing: the most profit driven commodity now is the human body in America sadly to say.
How we got here? Close your ears if your heart goes aflutter at talk of racial history...
from AI:
The campaign by the American Medical Association (AMA) to professionalize medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries directly undermined and replaced the tradition of original Black, or "Granny," midwives, contributing significantly to racial disparities in maternal health that persist today.
The tradition of original Black midwives.
o In the American South, Black "Granny" midwives were essential health care providers who drew upon ancestral knowledge passed down from Africa.
Highly respected community figures: During slavery and after Emancipation, they attended births for both Black and white women, providing compassionate and holistic care that addressed physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
o The primary source of care: In the rural South, they were often the only available health care professionals. By the 1940s, they attended up to 75% of births in the region.
o Superior outcomes: Early studies documented that midwife-attended births often had better maternal outcomes than hospital births.
The AMA's campaign against midwifery
As the medical field became professionalized in the mid-19th century, the AMA and other physician groups sought to eliminate midwives, especially Black and immigrant midwives, viewing them as competitors and "irregular practitioners".
o Exclusion from organized medicine: The AMA, founded in 1847, explicitly excluded Black doctors and women from membership.
o Systematic stigmatization: Physicians, such as influential obstetrician Dr. Joseph DeLee, launched public campaigns that demonized midwives and promoted hospital-based, medically managed childbirth as superior.
o Weaponizing regulation: Campaigns against midwives leveraged racist arguments to portray them as unscientific and unsafe. This laid the groundwork for policies like the 1910 Flexner Report, which set new standards for medical education and led to the closure of most Black medical schools, severely limiting the number of Black physicians.
o Discriminatory laws: In the 1920s, the Sheppard-Towner Act provided federal funding for maternal and child health programs that included midwifery training and regulation. However, states used new licensing requirements to phase out and delegitimize apprentice-trained traditional midwives, a change that disproportionately impacted Black and Indigenous midwives.
I've sometimes wondered what form the old saying 'A licence to print your own money ' would take...
Reads like a horror show for mothers and babies.
This is an excellent article! Thanks so much!
I have friends in the US who are quite wealthy and decided to do without health insurance because they can pay for anything out of pocket, and wouldn't it be easier to not deal with those guys. But they wanted to be in hospital just-in-case.
This was before Obamacare.
They avoided any medical care. But used the hospital room for a natural child birth. It took about 24 hours-- longer than expected but not outrageous.
The Bill? $57,000 USD. For the use of the room.
One thing they didn't know-- The hospital charges the uninsured 4x higher rates for everything, as part of their deal with the insurance companies "who get a substantial discount".
Including having unused equipment and staff hanging around.
I don't totally understand how or why this happened. Obviously it was a weird choice- but it exposed how the uninsured were mistreated.
My baby was born 3 wks early. My water broke within 2 hrs of having had a “regular” check in with my doctor who decided to do an internal exam to see how “far along I was”. That I believe was the cause of the water breaking, which created the “emergency” that now I needed to get to the hospital, where predictably I did not go into labour naturally and required oxytocin to induce labour, as now I was in the “danger zone” as too much time had passed. The whole thing was traumatic, I was stressed, my small baby developed jaundice, would not latch, was losing weight. I was in the hospital for 5 days which by the end I had to beg to be discharged. I had a small, colicky baby at home, not feeding well and eventually went to formula - which created feelings of failure and guilt. I actually have no recollection of whether I was told anything about Vit K shots or injections. I never wanted to get pregnant again after the whole experience and didn’t have anymore children which was not my original plan.
But then again maybe a midwife isn’t the way to go either.
Our first child born at home miles by water from electricity was given a “I presume this is the child that the mother carried eight weeks ago”. Still a birth certificate was issued
More accurately, a certificate of ownership. In Maritime/Admiralty "Law".
They weren’t going to let one slip by even if it wasn’t the right one
You, whoever you are, are doing outstanding work, thank you. I'm an N.D. who delivered my own children. I was taught by Henry Bieler, M.D. and can share with you several ideas you are not including. First is the cause and treatment of nausea of pregnancy and toxemia of pregnancy. I also have another interpretation of vernix caseosa. Contact me at Health@CharleyCropley.com
I can tell you where the nausea and possibly much of the toxicity comes from….
Synthetic vitamins! The nausea from the synthetic prenatal vitamins (all vitamins are synthetic if they’re not directly from real food) was my personal experience. Just eat a balanced healthy diet and watch for synthetic vitamins added to food.
That's a great point on the prenatal vitamins. They are one factor in the larger context of "everything that poisons" which includes overeating which causes the excess to ferment and putrify, a "sick" microbiome, as well as poisoning thru the skin and respiratory tract (and mind) all of which burden the liver with detoxification and the liver which empties toxic bile into the duodenum creates nausea. I hope this comes across.