What Is Preeclampsia?

An Essay on the Word That Was Retired, the Load That Was Added, and the Maternal Decompensation the Establishment Calls Unknown

The condition currently labeled preeclampsia by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the World Health Organization, and every textbook of obstetrics has an older name that carried a different meaning: toxemia of pregnancy. The rename removed the causal frame the older name embedded, without any discovery that the causal frame had been ruled out. This essay operates in two registers. Establishment vocabulary, including “preeclampsia,” “hypertensive disorders of pregnancy,” “immune,” “antibody,” “vitamin,” and “deficiency,” appears in quotation, attribution, and the titles of cited sources. My own analytical voice uses the older term when naming the underlying phenomenon and operates in the terrain framework I have developed across the Unbekoming catalogue. Toxemia is the pattern of failure that emerges when the maternal system’s capacity to metabolize its aggregate load is exceeded during pregnancy. The load has a primary source and several shadows. The primary source, per the arithmetic laid out in The Primary Cause, is injected. The shadows include inadequate nutrition, electromagnetic exposure, and chronic stress. The essay proceeds in that order.

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The Word That Was Retired

The Encyclopedia Britannica entry for toxemia of pregnancy reads: “term formerly used to describe hypertensive conditions that can be induced by pregnancy. This term, once commonly used, reflected the belief that toxins caused the hypertensive conditions. Research, however, failed to identify any toxins, and the term is now regarded as a misnomer.”¹

The passive voice conceals the argument. Research did not identify the specific single toxin the researchers were looking for. The establishment then concluded that toxins in general were not the cause, replaced the word that carried the toxic framing, and adopted a descriptor that names only the timing: “preeclampsia,” meaning “before eclampsia,” referring to the seizure that ends the cascade. The new word says nothing about mechanism. It could not, because the mechanism the older name had encoded had just been officially declared undiscoverable.

The 2022 review in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology traces the history. Under the older framework, “toxins gaining access to the maternal circulation have been proposed to mediate the clinical manifestations.”² Some sources thought to be exogenous, one investigator proposing a bacterial toxin, others thought to be endogenous, released by the placenta or the mother’s own metabolism. The paper adds: “The search for the toxins responsible for preeclampsia and eclampsia has lasted for more than a century.”

A century of searching for a single toxin failed. From this the establishment concluded that the terrain framework was wrong. What it did not consider is that the search had been structured incorrectly from the start. Toxic burden is cumulative. It arises from many simultaneous sources. It is not a single agent that a proper investigation would isolate. It is the aggregate load the maternal system is asked to metabolize on top of the extraordinary demands of pregnancy itself.

The historical timing warrants attention. “Toxemia” was standard obstetric vocabulary through the 1950s and into the 1960s. The shift toward “hypertensive disorders of pregnancy” as the umbrella classification was formalized through the 1970s and 1980s, and refined by the National High Blood Pressure Education Program Working Group Report on High Blood Pressure in Pregnancy in 1990.³ The window in which the diagnostic rename was completed overlaps with the expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule from a handful of injections in the early 1960s to more than a dozen by the early 1990s. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which removed manufacturer liability for vaccine injury and established the compensation program that shielded the industry from tort exposure, marks the pivotal legislative moment after which the schedule expanded rapidly.⁴ Routine maternal vaccination during pregnancy was industrialized subsequently: the 2004 expansion of the flu recommendation to all trimesters, the 2012 Tdap-every-pregnancy recommendation, the 2021 addition of COVID-19 mRNA products, and the 2023 addition of Pfizer’s Abrysvo RSV vaccine at 32-36 weeks.

The correlation between the retirement of the toxin frame from the diagnostic vocabulary and the scaling up of the injected toxin load is documented at the level of timeline. Whether it reflects deliberate paradigm management or the drift of an institutional system responding to its own incentives, the effect is the same. The vocabulary that would have permitted a physician to ask what toxins were entering the maternal circulation was cleared away during the decades in which the maternal toxin load, delivered by injection, was being scaled up systematically.

What was called toxemia of pregnancy in 1950 and preeclampsia in 2000 is the same clinical picture. What changed was the word, and with it the paradigm question a physician might be permitted to ask.

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The Physiology Both Names Describe

Sometime after the twentieth week of pregnancy, a woman’s blood pressure begins to rise. Protein appears in her urine, which the kidneys should be retaining in the blood. Her body swells with fluid pooling in the tissues instead of circulating properly. Her liver enzymes climb. Her platelet count falls. If the condition progresses to eclampsia, she seizes. Untreated, she can die. With modern intensive monitoring and emergency delivery, she often survives; her baby, born weeks or months early, sometimes does not.

The mainstream account holds that a poorly understood placental problem releases inflammatory signals into the maternal circulation, causing widespread endothelial dysfunction. The mechanism sits inside a black box, and the condition “resolves” only when the placenta is delivered.⁵

The physiology that runs beneath the clinical picture is not a mystery. Pregnancy places the maternal cardiovascular system under load that begins early. Cardiac output rises roughly 50 percent above pre-pregnancy levels by the fifth week.⁶ Blood volume expands by 40 to 50 percent across the pregnancy. The kidneys work harder. The liver metabolizes for two. The placenta functions as a specialized filter, moving nutrients across while attempting to exclude what should not reach the developing child.

When the demand exceeds the maternal system’s capacity, the response cascades. Blood pressure rises to force circulation through vessels whose endothelial lining is under chemical or inflammatory attack. The kidneys leak protein as filtration integrity is compromised. Fluid shifts out of the vessels into tissue. If the cerebral vasculature is overwhelmed, seizure follows.

This is not a distinct disease. It is the pattern of maternal decompensation under toxic overload. The older name carried this meaning. The new name does not.

The Primary Cause

The Primary Cause essay laid out the arithmetic. Joy Garner’s Control Group Survey, sampling 0.178% of the fully unvaccinated adult population across 48 states at a 99% confidence level, found a chronic disease rate of 2.64% in the fully unvaccinated. The rate in the vaccinated American adult population is 60%. Standard attributable-fraction methodology places vaccination’s contribution at 95.6% of the chronic disease load in the vaccinated population.⁷ Garner’s own conservative figure is over 90%. Either number reorders the frame. One impost dominates all others by an order of magnitude.

The dose-response is visible at every step of the schedule. Full avoidance produces 2.64% chronic disease. Adding exposure to the Vitamin K shot alone raises the rate to 11.73%. Adding maternal vaccine exposure alone raises it to 21.05%. Both together produce 30%. Completing the childhood schedule reaches 60%. Each incremental exposure adds to the burden. The direction is unambiguous.

Preeclampsia sits within the broader picture. It is one of the maternal outcomes the general framework predicts. A woman entering pregnancy in the modern American population is carrying the accumulated vaccination substrate of her own childhood schedule plus, in many cases, prior maternal vaccine exposures from earlier pregnancies. She is then, per the current CDC recommendations, injected multiple times during the pregnancy itself: Tdap in the third trimester, influenza in whatever trimester she happens to be in during flu season, COVID mRNA products since 2021, and Pfizer’s Abrysvo RSV vaccine at 32-36 weeks since 2023.⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹ Each injection adds directly to the maternal load at the moment of maximum physiological vulnerability. The rationale offered for each rests on what the establishment calls the transfer of maternal antibodies across the placenta to the developing infant. In the terrain framework, the injections are chemical events requiring metabolic response, layered onto a body whose baseline substrate was established decades earlier.

The physical composition of the injected load has been examined at the materials-science level. Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari’s 2017 microscope survey of 44 vaccines from the major manufacturers documented consistent contamination with heavy metals and industrial alloys, none disclosed on any label: lead, tungsten, stainless steel fragments, bismuth, gold, silver, platinum, cerium, zirconium, hafnium, antimony, strontium, barium.¹² The single veterinary vaccine in the sample, examined by the same instruments, contained none of these. The metals are biopersistent. The body has no enzymatic machinery for breaking down tungsten, lead, or rare-earth alloys. Once injected, they lodge in tissue and remain.

The disclosed contents matter alongside the undisclosed. Aluminum, in the form of aluminum hydroxide or aluminum phosphate, is the primary adjuvant in most vaccines on the modern schedule. Aluminum crosses the placenta in animal models. A 2021 Chinese case-control study found high concentrations of aluminum in maternal serum and placental tissue associated with increased risk for fetal neural tube defects.¹³ No biodistribution studies of vaccine aluminum have been conducted in pregnant women. Aluminum is documented as one of the most effective agents for reducing the zeta potential of blood, the electrical charge that keeps red blood cells suspended and prevents clumping. Reducing zeta potential produces blood sludging in the smallest vessels.¹⁴ The mechanism Andrew Moulden documented as Moulden Anoxia Spectrum Syndromes operates at exactly the sites where preeclampsia manifests: placental capillaries, renal capillaries, cerebral capillaries.

The Maternal Evidence

The specific signals for pregnancy-period vaccination are in the establishment’s own literature.

The Trotta cohort published in the British Medical Journal in 2014 followed pregnant women exposed to the MF59-adjuvanted A/H1N1 pandemic influenza vaccine during the 2009-2010 season in four Italian regions. Among more than 100,000 pregnancies analyzed, women vaccinated during the second or third trimester showed a statistically significant 19 percent higher rate of eclampsia (RR 1.19, 95% CI 1.04-1.39) than the unvaccinated comparison group. The rate of gestational diabetes was 26 percent higher (RR 1.26, 95% CI 1.04-1.53).¹⁵ The finding was published in a top-tier journal and never rescinded. It has not appeared in the ACIP recommendations for influenza vaccination during pregnancy.

The GSK phase 3 trial of a maternal RSV vaccine, RSVPreF3-Mat, was halted on February 25, 2022 after the independent data monitoring committee flagged an imbalance in preterm births. When the results appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in March 2024, preterm birth had occurred in 6.8 percent of vaccine recipients versus 4.9 percent in the placebo group, a relative risk of 1.37 (95% CI 1.08-1.74, P=0.01). Neonatal death was 0.4 percent in the vaccine group versus 0.2 percent in placebo. GSK discontinued the vaccine and closed the ongoing trials.¹⁶ Pfizer’s parallel product Abrysvo, a structurally similar vaccine, showed a numerically higher rate of preterm birth in its own trial. The Pfizer signal did not reach statistical significance. The FDA approved Abrysvo in August 2023 with a warning label about preterm birth if given before 32 weeks. The CDC recommended it in October 2023. The MMWR that carried the recommendation acknowledged in its own language that the benefits of vaccination outweighed the “potential risk for preterm birth and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.”¹⁷ Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy is the establishment’s current umbrella term. It includes gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, and eclampsia. The CDC named the risk and recommended the vaccine anyway. Pfizer did not inform its own trial participants about the GSK signal at the time it was disclosed.¹⁸

The Lin research letter in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in June 2024 examined placental tissue and cord blood from women who had received COVID-19 mRNA vaccines shortly before delivery. Vaccine mRNA was detected in the placental villi and decidua of both patients examined. Spike protein was detected in the placental tissue of one of the two patients by Western blot.¹⁹ The finding falsified the premise the establishment had relied on when recommending the vaccine to pregnant women. The mRNA does not remain at the injection site. It crosses the placenta. Spike protein is produced in the placenta itself, at the maternal-fetal interface, at the location where the vascular dysfunction the establishment identifies as central to preeclampsia is understood to originate.

For every vaccine currently recommended during pregnancy, the FDA has no clinical trial evidence establishing safety in pregnant women. In 2019, the Informed Consent Action Network filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking that evidence for the influenza vaccines. The FDA’s reply was six words: “We have no records responsive to your requests.”²⁰ The manufacturers’ own package inserts confirm the position. They state that it is “not known” whether the vaccines “will harm an unborn baby” and that there are “insufficient data” in pregnant women to inform vaccine-associated risks. No prospective randomized trials of Tdap in pregnancy exist. No biodistribution studies of vaccine aluminum in pregnant women exist. No prospective vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated maternal outcome trials for any of the currently recommended pregnancy vaccines exist. The absence of these studies is the evidence base. Nothing has been looked for, so nothing has been found.

The maternal load being added to the pregnancy by the current vaccine schedule is what the current diagnostic vocabulary describes as “unknown cause.”

The Nutritional Shadow

The Primary Cause essay showed that malnutrition, in the modern population, is largely a downstream consequence of the vaccination substrate. Damaged gut lining from injected adjuvants and metallic particles produces impaired absorption. Chronic illness reduces appetite. Pharmaceutical management of the diseases of adaptation depletes cofactors. The nutritional impost, examined closely, resolves substantially into the shadow of the primary one.

In pregnancy, the shadow retains an independent component that is larger than in the general adult population. A pregnant woman needs roughly one kilogram of new protein deposition to build the child. She needs the raw materials for a 40-50 percent expansion in her circulating blood volume. She needs the substrate for her liver to synthesize albumin at rates well above baseline. When those raw materials are inadequate for what the pregnancy is asking, the maternal system compensates until it cannot, and toxemia manifests.

This is the story Brewer, Burke, and the 1940s literature documented, and it holds in the pre-vaccine-era case with particular clarity. From 1963 to 1976, Thomas Brewer ran the prenatal clinic in Contra Costa County, California. His patient population was largely poor, largely young, and largely Black or Hispanic. In the highest-risk clinics before his intervention, roughly one in three of these women developed toxemia.²¹ Brewer instructed his patients to eat. Two eggs a day, a quart of milk, meat, fish, cheese, legumes, whole grains, salt to taste. He gave them 80 to 120 grams of protein daily and roughly 2,600 calories, and he told them to disregard the standing obstetric advice to restrict weight gain, restrict salt, or take diuretics.²² Over roughly thirteen years, more than 25,000 women followed his protocol. When the National Institutes of Health conducted a retrospective study of 5,615 of these pregnancies from 1965 to 1970, they recorded no cases of eclampsia.²³

Brewer was not the first. In 1943, Bertha Burke and colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health published “Nutrition Studies During Pregnancy” in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, documenting that women with adequate protein intake developed few complications while women eating protein-inadequate diets developed toxemia at high rates.²⁴ In 1952, Reginald Hamlin published a paper in The Lancet titled “The Prevention of Eclampsia and Preeclampsia,” describing how a nutrition program at the Women’s Hospital in Sydney had eradicated eclampsia in that prenatal clinic.²⁵ The current establishment literature confirms the physiological mechanism: a 2023 kinetic analysis in an anesthesia journal found that women with preeclampsia are “incapable of adequately handling an expansion of the extravascular fluid volume.”²⁶ Hypoalbuminemia is a recognized marker of preeclampsia severity in the current literature.²⁷ ²⁸

The Brewer window is worth examining precisely because of when it happened. His Contra Costa program ran from 1963 to 1976. The childhood vaccine schedule of that era was small compared to the current one. Routine maternal vaccination during pregnancy was not yet policy; the CDC’s recommendation for Tdap during every pregnancy came in 2012, and the pregnancy influenza recommendation was expanded to include all trimesters only in 2004. The women Brewer worked with entered pregnancy carrying a fraction of the accumulated vaccination substrate that a woman entering pregnancy in 2026 carries. They were not being injected during the pregnancy itself. Their primary load, in the vocabulary of the Primary Cause essay, was inadequate nutrition. Correcting that load cleared the condition.

What Brewer’s data shows, precisely, is what the nutritional shadow produces in the residual case. Absent the primary cause, or with the primary cause present at a much smaller magnitude than today, the nutritional shadow accounts for the visible toxemia. The 1943 Burke paper documented the same. Hamlin’s Sydney data documented the same. These findings hold. In the pre-vaccine-era case, the nutritional shadow was the dominant visible cause of toxemia, and Brewer’s diet resolved it.

The mainstream obstetric response was to bury the finding rather than adopt it, and the standard of care that persisted for decades made things worse: bed rest, salt restriction, low-calorie diets, diuretic drugs to remove edema, and in some periods amphetamines to suppress appetite.²⁹ Each intervention worked in the direction opposite to the physiology. The 1991 historical review of dietary sodium restriction concluded that “no convincing evidence has ever been produced” that salt restriction prevents hypertension during pregnancy.³⁰ The Cochrane Review of diuretics found that these drugs can further reduce the already-contracted plasma volume, worsening outcomes for mother and baby.³¹ Yet the framework persisted, and Brewer’s inversion did not enter the standard obstetric curriculum.

The current mainstream approach to preeclampsia prevention centers on three interventions: low-dose aspirin from twelve weeks of gestation for women at high risk; calcium supplementation, particularly in populations with low dietary intake; and increasingly, cholecalciferol and magnesium as adjuncts. The World Health Organization’s 2018 recommendation calls for 1.5 to 2 grams per day of calcium supplementation during pregnancy for the prevention of preeclampsia and its complications.³² None of these interventions delivers what a serving of whole food delivers. The compound sold as calcium supplement is an isolated substance stripped of the cofactor matrix that a serving of dairy or leafy greens carries alongside its calcium. It does not restore albumin or plasma volume. It generates revenue at every stage of a treadmill that never arrives at what an adequate diet would have provided without intervention.

The nutritional shadow remains a real component of the modern picture. It is smaller than it was in Brewer’s cohort, because the primary cause has grown larger. But it is real. A pregnant woman entering the current maternal vaccine schedule while eating a protein-inadequate industrial diet faces two loads whose sum exceeds what her body can compensate for. Whole-food nutrition, of the kind Brewer prescribed, reduces one of the two. It does not remove the primary cause.

The Other Shadows

Electromagnetic exposure is a real environmental variable. The pregnant body carrying the injected metallic inventory documented by Gatti and Montanari is electromagnetically reactive in a way an uncontaminated body is not. The particles absorb radiation from the same Wi-Fi routers, cell towers, and smart meters that everyone lives with. Local heating and oxidative stress at sites where the particles have lodged is a real physiological event, occurring at exposure levels the WHO calls safe.³³ In a pregnant body, those sites include the placenta itself. Reducing EMF exposure in a body carrying the substrate produces a real benefit: it reduces the ongoing multiplier on the primary cause.

Chronic stress is a real physiological variable. Hans Selye’s diseases of adaptation include cardiovascular problems, kidney dysfunction, and metabolic disturbances, which are the pathways through which severe preeclampsia progresses.³⁴ A woman managing pain, financial burden, poor sleep, and the anxiety of a high-risk pregnancy is under sustained input to her stress-response system. Her cortisol remains elevated. Her body’s cleansing and repair processes are suppressed. In a body already burdened by the injected substrate, the stress load adds another dimension of compensation that must be maintained.

Both shadows are real. Neither is the primary cause. Reducing them helps. In the modern maternal population, the primary cause remains what is being injected.

The Pattern

Toxemia of pregnancy is the latest entry in a long series of conditions medicine misdiagnosed before being forced to acknowledge the underlying cause. Pellagra was epidemic in the American South in the early twentieth century, initially classified as an infectious disease. Joseph Goldberger demonstrated through feeding trials that it tracked with diet.³⁵ His evidence was resisted by physicians committed to the infectious framework for more than a decade. Scurvy was recognized as a sailors’ condition; James Lind’s 1747 controlled trial demonstrated that fresh citrus prevented and reversed it.³⁶ When early twentieth-century polar expeditions developed scurvy despite carrying supplies labeled “lime juice,” the finding was that the juice had been concentrated, heated, and stored in ways that destroyed its efficacy. Beriberi devastated populations dependent on polished white rice; Takaki Kanehiro of the Japanese Imperial Navy demonstrated in the 1880s that changing rations eliminated the condition.³⁷ The establishment framework at the time held that beriberi was caused by a bacterial toxin.

Each of these conditions was initially classified as contagious, mysterious, or attributable to a toxin of unknown origin. On demonstration, each turned out to be a condition of what people were and were not eating. Establishment resistance persisted for years or decades before partial incorporation. The incorporation, when it came, credited a single isolated compound rather than the whole food the affected population was no longer consuming.

Toxemia of pregnancy fits the pattern and adds a twist. Pellagra, scurvy, and beriberi were eventually renamed in ways that acknowledged their cause, however imperfectly. Toxemia of pregnancy was renamed in the opposite direction. The word that carried the causal frame was retired. The new word encodes only when the condition happens, not what it is. Under the new name, the search for causes could be officially declared unresolved, and it has remained so ever since. The rename happened during the historical window in which the vaccine schedule was being industrialized. The diagnostic vocabulary was cleared of the toxin frame at the exact moment the injected toxin load was being scaled up.

The pattern repeats what the earlier conditions taught: the establishment prefers any explanation to the one that implicates its own products and revenue streams. Anything But Vaccines, as Sasha Latypova has named the operating logic. The maternal condition once called toxemia is the current site where the logic is being executed. The nutritional cause was documented in the 1940s and buried. The injected cause is being documented in the establishment’s own literature in real time, from the Trotta cohort forward, and being ignored in real time by the same institutions.

The Terrain Reading

The terrain framework does not require any of the establishment’s constructs to make sense of what is happening. Immune malfunction, autoimmune labeling, genetic predisposition, mysterious placental factors producing endothelial dysfunction through unknown mechanisms: these constructs exist to explain a phenomenon whose actual explanation has been ruled out at the level of diagnostic vocabulary.

There is a woman being asked by her body to build a child. She enters the pregnancy carrying the accumulated substrate of her own childhood vaccine schedule, deposited in her muscle, lymph, and possibly brain tissue since infancy. The metals in that substrate are biopersistent. They have been sitting in her for years. During the pregnancy she is injected multiple times more with substances that add to that load: aluminum-containing Tdap in the third trimester, one or more influenza vaccines depending on season, COVID-19 mRNA if she is subject to the current recommendation, and Pfizer’s Abrysvo RSV vaccine at 32-36 weeks. Each injection delivers to her circulation what the manufacturers disclose and what the microscopes have documented but the labels do not disclose. Her nutritional intake, in the modern industrial food environment, is likely inadequate for what pregnancy is asking of her, and inadequate in specific respects (protein density, salt to taste, whole-food matrices) that Brewer’s diet would have corrected. She is exposed to the same electromagnetic environment as everyone else, but her body is now electromagnetically reactive in a way an uncontaminated body would not be. Her stress load, as her pregnancy progresses and as any complications develop, adds sustained input to a physiology already carrying more than it can compensate for.

Her body compensates as long as it can. When it cannot, the physiology fails in the specific pattern medicine has named “preeclampsia” and once called “toxemia of pregnancy”: contracted plasma volume, activated renin-angiotensin system, elevated blood pressure, edema in the tissues, protein leaking from stressed kidneys. If the cerebral vasculature is overwhelmed, seizure follows.

The body is not attacking itself. The placenta is not malfunctioning at random. The kidneys are not failing for reasons unknown to science. Each organ is doing the best it can under conditions of aggregate load that exceeds capacity. The primary component of that load, per the Garner arithmetic, is the injected substrate. The remaining components are its shadows, some real in their own right and larger in specific cases.

The terrain framework does not resolve what should be done at the moment a woman is already in severe preeclampsia and about to seize. Magnesium sulfate at that point has its use. Delivery at that point may be necessary to save both lives. What the terrain framework resolves is how she arrived at that point. She was carrying an accumulated load whose primary component the establishment has spent a century declining to name. She was, in accordance with current guidelines, injected multiple additional times during the pregnancy with substances whose effects on the maternal-placental unit have never been characterized in any pre-licensure trial. She was, if she happened to be under-nourished for what her body was being asked to do, also carrying the nutritional shadow. The interventions she was offered before the crisis, in the historical record and often in current practice, made things worse.

The finding that inadequate maternal nutrition contributes to toxemia in the residual case has been in the literature for eighty-three years, and buried. The finding that the injected load is the primary cause of the modern population’s chronic-disease burden, including its share of maternal decompensation during pregnancy, is younger. The Trotta cohort published it in 2014. The GSK trial confirmed it in 2022. The MMWR acknowledged it in 2023. The Lin letter documented the physical substrate reaching the placenta in 2024. The FDA admitted the evidence base does not exist in 2019.

Both findings wait in the literature for anyone who cares to look. The primary cause has a syringe. What is in it is what the microscopes show and what the label discloses. What comes out of it is being added to a maternal system that is already being asked to build a child, and the outcomes are being described as unknown.

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How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Imagine your mommy has a garden. She grows food in it. When you were born, the garden was already there, and she had been growing food in it for a long time to get ready for you.

Now imagine that for years and years before you were born, other people came into the garden and threw pieces of rusty metal onto the soil. Little pieces. Every year, a few more. The metal did not go away. It just sat in the soil. The garden still grew food, but the soil had metal in it. Then your mommy got pregnant with a new baby. While she was pregnant, the same people came back and threw more metal onto the soil. Big handfuls of it this time. They said it was to protect the baby.

The garden tried to keep growing food for the baby. It tried very hard. But the soil was full of metal, and there was more coming in every few weeks, and no one was giving the garden extra good compost to help. After a while, the food started coming out wrong. The tomatoes got splotchy. The lettuce wilted. The whole garden started to look sick. Doctors have a big name for what happens when a mommy’s garden gets like that. They call it “preeclampsia.” They say they don’t know why it happens.

Long ago, doctors called it “toxemia.” That word means “poison in the blood.” Then they changed the name to a word that doesn’t mean anything about what causes the sickness. Now they can say they don’t know.

Some doctors, a long time ago, figured out that if a mommy eats lots and lots of good food, her garden can grow better even when things are hard. Twenty-five thousand mommies did what those doctors said, and none of them got the worst kind of sick. Not one. Most doctors today don’t know about those doctors. And no one in charge is talking about the metal that keeps getting thrown on the soil.

If you ever grow up and have a baby in your body, eat lots of good food. Eat lots of eggs. And ask a lot of very hard questions about anything anyone wants to put into you with a needle.

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In Print

Thirteen of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.

Two go to the paradigm underneath the whole shelf. No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews, catalogues 258 failed contagion experiments and the case against germ theory itself. No Virus takes the examination one layer deeper — the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal of the entities the framework is built on.

Four take on the remedies and paradigm questions mainstream medicine actively suppresses. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence. The Iodine Book recovers an essential mineral driven out of easy reach by bromide, fluoride, and perchlorate — and the pharmacological tradition that kept its therapeutic use alive across the decades mainstream medicine set it aside. The Hydrogen Peroxide Book recovers a century of practice with a compound the body already makes — mitochondrial, phagocytic, part of thyroid hormone synthesis — suppressed precisely because its clinical utility threatened the pharmaceutical direction that captured twentieth-century medicine.

Two more take on the remedies already in your kitchen. Baking Soda locates sodium bicarbonate inside the terrain framework industrial medicine buried — the compound already in your cupboard, and what it does at the level of the blood, kidneys, lungs, digestion, and skin. The Castor Oil Book recovers four thousand years of documented practice on the medicine mainstream healthcare quietly stopped talking about — the kitchen bottle that doesn’t sit well in a system built on prescriptions and procedures.

A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

References

1. Encyclopædia Britannica. “Toxemia of pregnancy.” Britannica.com, accessed 2026. https://www.britannica.com/science/toxemia-of-pregnancy

2. Erez O, Romero R, Jung E, Chaemsaithong P, Bosco M, Suksai M, Gallo DM, Gotsch F. “Preeclampsia and eclampsia: the conceptual evolution of a syndrome.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 226(2S):S786–S803, February 2022.

3. National High Blood Pressure Education Program Working Group. “Report on High Blood Pressure in Pregnancy.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 163(5 Pt 1):1691–1712, 1990. The report formalized the modern classification of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy that has been iterated by ACOG in subsequent Practice Bulletins.

4. National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, Public Law 99-660. The Act removed manufacturer liability for vaccine injury and established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). For documentation of the schedule expansion following passage, see the CDC’s historical childhood immunization schedules, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

5. Waker CA, Hwang AE, Bowman-Gibson S, et al. “Mouse models of preeclampsia with preexisting comorbidities.” Frontiers in Physiology 14:1137058, 2023. Representative of the current mainstream mechanistic account.

6. Sanghavi M, Rutherford JD. “Cardiovascular physiology of pregnancy.” Circulation 130(12):1003–1008, 2014. Summary of the standard obstetric physiology literature on cardiac output during pregnancy.

7. Garner J. “Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated.” Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination. Control Group Survey conducted across 48 states, 2019-2020, 0.178% random sample of the fully unvaccinated population, 99% confidence level. See also Unbekoming, “The Primary Cause,” July 2026, and Unbekoming, “Vaccinated (60%) vs Unvaccinated (2.64%),” September 2024.

8. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Tdap Vaccination for Pregnant Women.” CDC pertussis vaccine guidance. https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/vaccines/tdap-vaccination-during-pregnancy.html

9. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “Update on Immunization and Pregnancy: Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Pertussis Vaccination.” ACOG Committee Opinion 718, September 2017.

10. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Vaccine recommendations before, during, and after pregnancy.” CDC, updated 2024.

11. Fleming-Dutra KE, Jones JM, Roper LE, et al. “Use of the Pfizer Respiratory Syncytial Virus Vaccine During Pregnancy.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 72(41):1115–1122, October 13, 2023.

12. Gatti AM, Montanari S. “New quality-control investigations on vaccines: micro- and nanocontamination.” International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination 4(1):7–14, 2017. See also Unbekoming, “What Is Really in Childhood Vaccines,” June 2026.

13. Yin S, Wang C, Wei J, et al. “High concentrations of aluminum in maternal serum and placental tissue are associated with increased risk for fetal neural tube defects.” Chemosphere 284:131644, 2021. On animal-model biodistribution of aluminum across the placenta, see also Anane R, et al., “Transplacental passage of aluminum from pregnant mice to fetus organs after maternal transcutaneous exposure,” Human & Experimental Toxicology 16(9):501–504, 1997.

14. Riddick TM. Control of Colloid Stability through Zeta Potential. Livingston Publishing, 1968. See also Unbekoming, “Zeta Potential,” September 2024.

15. Trotta F, Da Cas R, Spila Alegiani S, Gramegna M, Venegoni M, Zocchetti C, Traversa G. “Evaluation of Safety of A/H1N1 Pandemic Vaccination during Pregnancy: Cohort Study.” BMJ 348:g3361, May 29, 2014. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.g3361. PMID: 24874845.

16. Dieussaert I, et al. “RSV Prefusion F Protein–Based Maternal Vaccine — Preterm Birth and Other Outcomes.” New England Journal of Medicine 390(11):1009–1021, March 14, 2024. See also GlaxoSmithKline press release, February 28, 2022, on the halt of the RSVPreF3-Mat trial.

17. Fleming-Dutra KE, et al. MMWR 72(41), as cited in reference 11. Direct quotations: the recommendation cites the “potential risk for preterm birth and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy” and reports pregnancy-related serious adverse events in 16.2% of vaccine recipients versus 15.2% of placebo recipients.

18. Boytchev H. “The BMJ investigates concerns over informed consent for pregnant women in Pfizer’s RSV vaccine trial.” BMJ, November 2023.

19. Lin X, Botros B, Hanna M, Gurzenda E, De Mejia CM, Chavez M, Hanna N. “Transplacental transmission of the COVID-19 vaccine messenger RNA: evidence from placental, maternal, and cord blood analyses postvaccination.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 230(6):e113–e116, June 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.ajog.2024.01.022. PMID: 38307473.

20. Kennedy RF Jr, on behalf of Informed Consent Action Network and Children’s Health Defense. “FDA Admits That Government Is Recommending Untested, Unlicensed Vaccines for Pregnant Women.” Children’s Health Defense press release, February 11, 2019, documenting the ICAN v. FDA FOIA response: “We have no records responsive to your requests.”

21. Brewer T. “Metabolic toxemia of late pregnancy in a county prenatal nutrition education project: A preliminary report.” Journal of Reproductive Medicine 13:175, 1974.

22. Brewer GS and Brewer T. What Every Pregnant Woman Should Know: The Truth About Diets and Drugs in Pregnancy. Random House, 1977.

23. National Institutes of Health retrospective study of 5,615 pregnancies delivered in Contra Costa County, California, 1965–1970. Data cited in Brewer, T., “Metabolic toxemia of late pregnancy in a county prenatal nutrition education project,” Journal of Reproductive Medicine 13:175, 1974, and in the Brewer archival materials at healthybirth.net/an-interview-with-dr-tom-brewer/.

24. Burke BS, Beal VA, Kirkwood SB, and Stuart HC. “Nutrition studies during pregnancy.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 46:38, 1943.

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26. Hahn RG, et al. “Maldistribution of fluid in preeclampsia: a secondary kinetic analysis.” Anesthesia & Analgesia, 2023.

27. Nurdiati DS, et al. “Hypoalbuminemia as a severity predictor of preeclampsia in a multicenter study from Indonesia.” Scientific Reports, PMC13490576, 2019.

28. Gojnic M, et al. “Plasma albumin level as an indicator of severity of preeclampsia.” Clinical and Experimental Obstetrics and Gynecology 31(3):209–210, 2004.

29. Historical summary of standard-of-care obstetric protocols for threatened toxemia in the 1950s through 1970s, including bed rest, salt restriction, low-calorie diets, diuretics, and amphetamine appetite suppression. See “Dr. Brewer’s Pregnancy Diet,” Modern Mom, 2013, and Steegers-Theunissen et al. (reference 30).

30. Steegers EAP, Van Lakwijk HPJM, Jongsma HW, et al. “Dietary sodium restriction during pregnancy; a historical review.” European Journal of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 40(2):83–90, 1991.

31. Churchill D, Beevers GDG, Meher S, and Rhodes C. “Diuretics for preventing pre-eclampsia.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CD004451, 2007.

32. World Health Organization. “WHO recommendation: Calcium supplementation during pregnancy for the prevention of pre-eclampsia and its complications.” Geneva: WHO, 2018.

33. Blank M. Overpowered: The Dangers of Electromagnetic Radiation (EMF) and What You Can Do about It. Seven Stories Press, 2014.

34. Selye H. The Stress of Life. McGraw-Hill, 1976. (Revised edition; originally published 1956.)

35. Kraut AM. Goldberger’s War: The Life and Work of a Public Health Crusader. Hill and Wang, 2003.

36. Lind J. A Treatise of the Scurvy. Edinburgh, 1753. On the failure of concentrated lime juice in the early twentieth-century polar expeditions, see Hughes RE, “The rise and fall of the ‘antiscorbutics’: some notes on the traditional cures for ‘land scurvy,’” Medical History 34(1):52–64, 1990.

37. Sugiyama T and Sugiyama Y. “The story of beriberi: from an unknown disease to a preventable and treatable condition.” Nihon Rinsho 66(6):1035–1041, 2008.

Additional Sources

Lester D, Parker D. What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong. 2019.

Cowan T. The Contagion Myth. Skyhorse Publishing, 2020.

Latypova S. Public writing and interviews on Anything But Vaccines (ABV) as the operating logic of captured pharmaceutical regulation.

Moulden A. Lecture material and clinical writing on Moulden Anoxia Spectrum Syndromes.

Unbekoming. “The Primary Cause: An Essay on One Impost, Three Shadows.” July 2026.

Unbekoming. “Four Causes, Seventy Thousand Diseases.” January 2026.

Unbekoming. “The Streetlight Effect.” January 2026.

Unbekoming. “What Is Really in Childhood Vaccines.” June 2026.

Unbekoming. “Zeta Potential.” September 2024.

Unbekoming. “Vaccinated (60%) vs Unvaccinated (2.64%).” September 2024.

Unbekoming. “The Unvaccinated: Proof of What We Lost.” August 2025.