The Childbirth Truth Squad

Another tactic after banning a poster for valid criticism is to adopt a similar screen name and take the opposite position.   UPUPDATE  She says she is not and seems quite convincing, in spite the missing links.   She wins by a proponderance of the evidence and the fact the burden of proof would lie here and not with her.  

So now we can move forward.  Instead of feeling that conceding a mistake is like a Scarlet Letter A, I will celebrate the fact that I have found someone who loves the letter B, as much as I do!

  (BTW, talking about “winning” debates is not banned here as it is on Our Bodies Our Very Tightly Controlled and Managed Self-Image, even if it is the other side that wins.   Nor is conceding points, learning new things, and being persuaded to change one’s stance in face of the evidence.   Refreshing, isn’t it!) 

It is still maintained that Evil Twin-ing does in these debates.   Documentation will have to wait for a better example. 

   UPDATE  Big B now claims she or he has been posting on childbirth blogs looooong before the deletefest began.    She has been asked for some links to old comments to verify.

When banned from Amy Romano’s  Science Fiction and Insensitivity (aka Science and Sensibility  — afterall we do want it to come up on googgle), as “b”,  for doing  terrible things like knowing research and statistics,  her evil twin “B” emerged.    Or maybe little b just got bigger from hanging around that fat confidence inteval from the Wax meta-analysis.

http://www.scienceandsensibility.org/?p=1389

Amy Tuteur, MD

August 4th, 2010 at 10:42 | #20

Reply | Quote

Amy “It’s my blog and I’ll delete if I want to” Romano doesn’t have a sense of humor, it seems.

A spoof of her Normal Birth Conference never made it past the censors.

http://skepticalob.blogspot.com/2010/07/trust-menstruation.html

A mother’s story of midwife attended homebirth where the most obvious signs of problems were ignored and her precious daughter died.  The blog also details the ugly attacks on the mother in the aftermath, by the midwifery community in general and the cover-up by her own midwife.

She reports being deleted on Mothering.com.   Her link was refused posting as part of another post on Our Bodies Our Selves

http://ecmama.blogspot.com/2010/06/answers.html

From Trucial on About # [Pending]

Dr. Amy by any other name…

This one was from the women’s site Babble in 2009, a site that seems to be neutral on these issues.  (It featured a debate on homebirth with a pro and con author).

 In situations where the Birth Junkies don’t control what gets posted with their iron fists, they substitute heavy use of the “Flag for Abuse” Button.   Since most sites automatically take down a post when a certain number of complaints are registered, this is an effective part of the Midwifery Mind Control toolkit. 

Pointing out errors = Abuse.  

J. Block is Jennifer Block of http://www.pushedbirth.com, the quotes are from a prior post of hers.   This incident had a rarely seen happy ending when the site restored one of the two deleted posts.  Nevertheless, JB, an active participant up to that point, stopped posting. 

If they can’t answer the criticism, delete it.  If they can’t delete it, run away. 

As stated in the exchange: “As you hit the “flag for abuse” button to silence valid criticism, think about why you want to hide this information so badly.”

http://www.babble.com/Feedback/FeedbackMiddle1Top1.aspx?feedbackItemId=10991&returnTarget=%2Fwinning-homebirth-debate%2Findex.aspx

“Pulling numbers from the CDC Wonder web site to compare the outcomes of place of birth and birth attendant is not appropriate for a number of reasons, first because there’s been no analysis to control for confounding variables,”  J. Block
 
Some journalist.  Obviously, you have never looked at this database.  Or, you are too uninformed about medical risk factors and the statistics you claim to report on to use it.

“and also because there’s no mechanism to separate births that were intended to happen out-of-hospital from those that were unattended accidents.”  J Block

Gee, why not try that button that allows you to select out “other midwife”  or the (gasp) series of three clicks that will allow you to separate out out of hospital births by birth attendant?  Midwives and their proponents are soooo scientific, but they can’t figure out how to use a database.

BTW, that same database doesn’t have any record of about 90% of the deaths described in the Johnson/Daviss study.   I guess the circumstances of those deaths really weren’t as unavoidable as the midwives claim.   And the database suggest there were more of them.  Of course, those type of problems are well-known when data is self-reported, especially whent the party has an interest in the outcome.  

That’s midwifery “evidence”.  Don’t tell about some of your deaths, make excuses for the ones that remain.    Drop the “excused” ones from your data.  Compare to higher risk hospital patients.  BINGO.  Midwives are safe!!!

And you wonder why this stuff isn’t catching on. 

posted by : thinking woman on 8/10/2009 at 11:43 AM Flag For Abuse

 

1. What happened to the 2 posts where Jennifer Block made a huge mistake and it was  pointed out?

   She (Block) claimed that the CDC database (which records all deaths in the US, not just the ones midwives choose to report, like the Johnson and davis study) couldn’t differentiate between homebirths with midwives and accidents or risk factors.   There’s a bunch of filter buttons on the entry page that let you do just that. 

   This egregious error highlights that Block just repeats baseless midwifery propaganda.  She clearly never looked at this database.  She just pulled out a bunch standard issue criticisms to match her standard issue rhetoric.

   She’s not journalist reporting on research.  She doesn’t know enough about research in the first place.   (check out her laughable explanation on why we can just skip randomized controls!!).  And she only “reports” on baseless claims of midwifery as if they were research.   

   Block never talks about all the dropped/unreported deaths of this so-called midwifery research.  She never “reports” on the contrast between that  and complete national databases.  

   Most of the deaths claimed by the Johnson and Daviss study are desecribed in detail.  Most can’t be found in the national database (where you can set the filters to look for them in detail).  Isn’t that a story that a *journalist* should be interested in?   

   As you hit the “flag for abuse” button to silence valid criticism, think about why you want to hide this information so badly.

posted by : Jennifer Block covers up on 8/11/2009 at 8:45 AM Flag For Abuse

1. Thanks to whomever for putting the missing posts back. 

   Needless to say, it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.  

   Now, can someone on the pro-midwife side tell us if they are still claiming this is “safe” when it has 3X the neonatal death rate (per J and D raw data self-report — before they scrubbed all the data –  and national records) and 10X the intrapartum death rate (per their own self-report, compared with prior hospital studies, just like J and D did for post-natal deaths)? 

   The silence is deafening.

   I also find it laughable that Ms. Cheney highlights the shortcomings of birth/death records, yet embraces self-reported data from those with a great self-interest in the outcome!   And it’s data no outsiders can see. It sounds more like the midwifery avoidance of transparacy and accountability.  
     
   Some how I have trouble with the Johnson Davis because:
   1) two of the “fatal anomalies” it lists aren’t really fatal anomalies.  They’re just anomalies.
   2) 90% of the deaths described don’t come anywhere’s close to matching death certs.
   3) Neonatal SIDS is rare as hen’s teeth in the rest of life, yet occurs in spades in homebirth midwifery deaths.  In fact, it seems that it doesn’t happen anywhere else.  Maybe avoid homebirth midwives because they increase this rare unheard of neonatal SIDS.   Shouldn’t this be part of informed consent?  ; )  
   4) A stillborn child somehow or other has a positive apgar score. Don’t you  have to be born alive and then die to get that?

   Can someone explain all this to me?

posted by : not covering but not answering e on 8/11/2009 at 2:23 PM Flag For Abuse

 

Here’s a quick compilation of all things sent as criticisms to Science (fiction) and Sensibility in response to her critique of a recent home birth meta-analysis that Romano would not publish, plus a few bonus points.  http://www.scienceandsensibility.org/?p=1349  They cannot be reposted verbatim, because math geeks worry about being ignored for being too boring, more than deleted for controversy.

It’s a “discredited methodology”   As mentioned in a prior post , Birth Junkies are also Cochran Review Junkies.     Anything that deviates from their methods is bad.   Rest assured, Cochran’s Paint-By-Numbers  Review methods are not the only acceptable way to do a meta.   In fact,  it’s a very amateurish way.  People who know what they are doing, don’t need a cookbook.  Or perhaps she is referring to the methodology of the actual studies.  Also, not true.  

Birth Junkies complain that a well-known study from Washington state did not distinguish between unplanned and planned home births.    But, they did limit it to near full-term.   The percentage of full-term women who accidentally give birth at home is minsicule.  Middle-of-the-snowstorm rural Washingtonians might be found here.    This is different than precipitious birth that occur accidently occur outside the hospital, but not at home.    The main reason they don’t make it is the birth is going so smoothly that it happens too fast.   These actually have among the lowest death rates.   But, both are very small part of  the close to full-term crowd.  The error is miniscule and favors the Junkies to boot.  More importantly, given the huge increase in death rate in the homebirth, a huge percentage of full-term out of  hospital births would have to accidental to shift the conclusion.  They still lost.   

Decades old?   Again, this could only help home birth.  The rate of low-risk infant death in hospitals has dropped dramatically over the years.   In the days of old, the higher hospital rates would be closer to the home birth crowd, which haven’t changed much since dinosaurs roamed the earth.    Again, a glitch that can only help them.  They still lost.

Some Didn’t Count Intrapartum Death    Again, this omission favors midwives whose own data shows they kill early and often.   In physicians, the ratio of intrapartum asphyxia death and post-birth asphyxia death in low risk pregnancies used to be 1 to 1.  Because of fetal monitoring and the dreaded c-section, it is about 1 to 3, today.    In U.S. lay midwives, it is 1 to 2.   The main reason it doesn’t get studied anymore is because in physicians and their low risk patients, the overall rate is almost non-existant (3/10,000)     Lay midwives int he US have been shown to have rates of 10/10,000 or three times higher.  Yes, it is very amenable to birth strategies, ones midwives don’t do!  Third time is a charm.  It favors midwives and they still loose. 

Adding deaths that occurred between 8-28 days (which are less likely to be related to intrapartum events and therefore are less modifiable by birth setting),  She was blissfully unaware that birth asphyxia kills in this timeframe and is very relevant to the discussion.  Midwives deaths in the US, tend to occur later among those who make it out of the womb alive.   Neonatal birth asphyxia death is largely a controlled decision to discontinue life support and can be delayed for social reasons.  By eliminating the rest of the first month, you are eliminating a disproportionate share of the midwifery deaths. 

She doesn’t give us a lot of detail what is so discredited.  It is simply important to blanket the airwaves and ether with that notion whenever unfavorable data emerge.    

The Forest Plot    Too funny.     See related post at this blog.     The people who know what they are doing don’t need a paint-by-numbers research method.   They don’t need pictures either.  They certainly don’t need them where technically you are not supposed to have them.

And she is  perplexed by the use of a fixed-effects model for the analysis of neonatal death.    It says in the paper they tested for homogeneity, how they did it and why they did it.   Romano is apparently perplexed because she doesn’t know what any of these big words found in the paper mean.    But, saying some big word’s use perplexes you makes it look like you do know what they mean and that your badmouthing is very learned instead of more like than propaganda.

Meta-analysis is about Power and The Truth    The tablets came down from the mount and told her this.   Probably, at the end of the Cochran Paint-By-Numbers Review manual, the final instruction is “This is the Truth, you must implement this in clinical practice as mindlessly as you performed this review.”  Midwives may have these monolithic beliefs, but the rest of us do not.

The Netherlands   She suggests we should simply adopt the findings of a study from the Netherlands that showed that home birth and hospital birth had the same death rates.  

Apparently the unflawed, not discredited, One True and Just methodology for meta-analysis is where the selection criteria is only one single solitary lonely study you can find that give you the results you want.  

She notes, in great detail, the figures from the study.   The death rate is 3.4/1000 in home and hospital.   It doesn’t register that this is about three times higher than the US, at 1/1000.   It doesn’t register that this is bad.

When it is pointed out that The Netherlands doesn’t have safe homebirth with midwives, but rather crappy hospital birth with midwives, as well, she evades the issues by saying this is not a cross-cultural comparison.   Ok, let’s make US homebirth as safe as hospitals by taking everything out of the latter.

A confidence interval you could drive a truck through?  She notes “a 95% chance that home birth increases the risk of neonatal death by somewhere between 32% and 625%”  Ummm, uumm Amy, the entire, drive your truck through it interval is all way, way, way on the side against home births.   This is fact is bad for your position.  Very very very bad.  Whatever the True Increase is, it means homebirth is worse, much worse.    You looked at everything up and down, good and bad, things you like and things you don’t.  The best it gets is 32% worse.  It doesn’t register.

 She concludes with notion we have to bring this practice which, unbeknownst to her, she has just shown is waaaay bad into the mainstream.  She states that there is no “standard safety net in place for women who begin labor with the intention to birth at home but turn out to need hospitalization in order to birth safely”   I believe this thing is called the emergency room.  Do they not teach that is the “U.S. Maternity Care And How the Patriarchy Ruined It” class?

Post anything that Birth Junkies have deleted, failed to post, or avoided by changing the subject or ignoring.   It will NOT appear here as a comment.  It will be elevated to become its own post.  You can veiw any comments to it and respond in the comment section under it, link to you own blog, send an e-mail back to the offender

http://www.scienceandsensibility.org/?p=1349

Back at LaMaze’s Science and Sensibility we get a twofer of evasion.  The link shows the blog’s host, Amy Romano gushing over the Netherlands and their study of home birth safety.  She promotes it and the study as gold standards of health care and research. 

When it is pointed out that The Netherlands has terrible death rates whether homebirthing or hospital birthing because they use midwives for both places, the tone changes.  First, there are erroneous statements trying to defend this midwifery paradise (and baby nightmare).   When  those are shot down as patently false, Ramano goes missing from the conversation.  Her minnions try to deflect attention away from the news of  The Netherlands very poor ranking among european countries, by arguing about which countries are in Europe.    I believe their next order of business will be to nominate The Sudan to the EU so The Netherlands will have company at the bottom of the perionatal health rankings

Their views on the world are as imperialisitic as their views on childbirth.   And they don’t want you to see them embarass themselves by acting narrow-minded, so the below was not published.   

When critics of midwifery change the subject it is called “derailing”.  When midwives do it is called “discussion”.    

July 17th, 2010 at 20:59 | #2

Derailing? Isn’t that what they call it in your country?

Reply | Quote

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

“Or perhaps from your perspective, “all of Europe” does not include “those people”, only “real Europeans”? (ie, Western Europe).
It is true that among the 9 countries classified by WHO as “Western Europe”, the Netherlands’ rate of 8 per thousand is next to last, just ahead of Luxembourg (which is so tiny that its rate may be less reliably comparable).”

Well, I descend from “those people” and I don’t consider myself to be of European descent. I’m Slavic. I guess, you and the other the “real europeans” feel they have the right to tell everyone else who and what they are and just annex us at will because you are so superior!

mom

July 17th, 2010 at 21:19 | #3

Reply | Quote

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

@Indiana

“EU does not = “all of Europe”
Facts are facts, geography is geography, and hyperbole is hyperbole.”

And they are whatever the oh-so important people of Western European descent dictate to the rest of us little people.

“Any reasonable person reading that original statement would assume that “Europe” = “Europe” not “Europe” = EU.”

And now She That Must Be Obeyed has commanded what we all must think…..

Yes, your majesty. Oh, and no you are not Butt Naked, your clothes look fabulous.

I can’t believe you are evading addressing major flaws with your imperilistic views on childbirth with your imperilistic views on the world.