None. Stewart Fishbuy and Dr. Stew,
thank you for joining me again in the trenches.
Father Jeremy, it's nice to be, It's nice to be here with you.
This is for my UK column audience.
And so I know that you know the story, but if you don't mind,
I'm just going to quickly contextualize how I came across
you and, and it has a significant impact on my
personal life. But I suppose towards the
beginning of last year, my wife and I was sitting down having
lunch with a friend of ours and he said, look to my wife, you've
just fallen pregnant. Have you, have you thought about
home birth and more specifically something called hypno birthing?
And my wife responded with fear like, that sounds crazy.
Like, you know, I don't want to die.
You know, I think going to hospital makes makes more sense.
And then a few weeks later, we went on a road trip and we, we,
we got the audio books that he recommended and we listened and
we were blown away. We couldn't believe that this
idea of home birthing could actually be a legitimate thing
and, and it, and it could be, it could be safe.
And so while we were driving, my wife was on her phone and she
was looking for some podcasts that now could maybe, you know,
chat about, say something about home birth.
And she stumbled across yours and we started listening and we
couldn't stop. And we just, she just went
through episode after episode after episode.
And and then she said, you have to get him on your podcast.
This is phenomenal. Then a few months later, she
attempted the home birth. There were a couple
complications, as you now know, behind the scenes, but she had
No Fear at all. And she said that that was
actually not a scary birth whatsoever.
And we have a beautiful, healthy boy as you, as you also know.
So with that in mind, my question is, why was she
fearful? So first thing I want to say is
I want to cry with joy at the, at your, your story.
And then how, how bliss and I, if my Co host affected your,
your life in a, in a positive way.
That's sort of why we do what we do.
You know, I'm old now. I practiced for 40 years.
I was a a private physician 25 years in the hospital.
Well, 28 years in the hospital and 12 years at home.
And my initial training was such that I was trained in the
medicalized birth model thinking that pregnancy itself is a high
risk condition and that everything about pregnancy is a
potential disaster. And this is the model by which
current doctors and a lot of midwives now and certainly
nurses are trained in that pregnancy is an illness and
needs to be treated. And so obviously, if it's an
illness, you you start to fear it.
Where did this all begin? This all began in the early
1920s in my country when John D Rockefeller, who was famous for
being very wealthy and, and in the petroleum industry, hired a
guy named Flexner. And I'm just paraphrasing the
story here, obviously for time to put out a report that
basically said that the only best way to take care of people
is through modern medicine, which was pharmaceutical based
and based in the hospital. And they essentially took over
the medical schools and then they vilified midwives and
naturopaths and alternative medicine things and it became a
lucrative hospital based practice.
And how do you control people best to get them to do that?
You scare them. You scare them about
naturopathy, you scare them about midwifery and you scare
them about their own bodies that pregnancy itself could go wrong
at any time. And what does a woman want more
than anything else in the world? She wants the safety of her
baby. So if you can make a woman think
that if she doesn't do what the doctors say, that she might in
some way be harming her baby, then you can get people to do
pretty much anything you want. And so fear became the tool that
was used to take something as natural as conceiving, growing
and birthing A mammalian baby and turning it into a disease.
And so that's where we are. And we're, you know, the granny
midwives and, and older people have known this for a long time,
but with they've been squashed. But if their system was so good,
Jeremy, then why isn't it so good?
Why did we go in the last 50-60 years from AC section rate of 5%
to AC section rate? Now you told me it's closing out
80% in your country? Yes, in in the in the private
sector, yes. Yeah, in my country it's in the
mid 30s, right? So that's 600% increase in my
country. Why did we go to more monitoring
of babies, more ultrasounds, more vaginal exams, more
antibiotics, more artificial drugs, more inductions, more
newborn intensive care unit admissions?
Every category of things getting worse has happened.
And yet the people that are running the the system are not
concerned about all that they wanted.
They're just concerned about controlling the system.
It really isn't about intent, it's about outcomes and the
outcomes that we have in all other countries are are crappy.
And yet the people that have made it crappy want to do more
stuff to make it more crappier, if that's a word, But and fear
is the. Way they do it.
If I, if I were to scare you, if I were to pull out what they
call the dead baby card, by the way, everything that I just told
you that they're doing is a violation of every tenet of
medical ethics. Medical ethics dictates that
given the same information, it's not reasonable to expect two
people to come to the same conclusion.
Medical ethics, as a decisionally capable person, has
the right to determine bodily autonomy, that they have the
right to refuse treatment if they choose to do so, that that
you can't be touched without your permission.
And yet these kind of assaults go on every day in doctors
offices and hospitals around the world, and nobody says anything.
It's, it's very interesting because from the time I chatted
to last year to now, my whole paradigm has shifted.
And it's, it's made me so uncomfortable based on the fact
that my whole life I thought something about childbirth that
was completely false. And so did my wife.
And so do most people in my circles.
You know what? If I say home birth, they go.
Are you sure about that? Yeah, well, you know, Jim
Gaffigan is a comedian here in the United States.
I don't know if you know him there and he he does a stand up
routine about home birth because he's had five kids and they've
all been born at home. And one of the things he says
is, yeah, he was talking to his friend about, yeah, he and his
wife are choosing home birth. And his friend says, oh, we were
thinking about that, but we wanted our baby to live so.
Where does where does that come from?
I mean, so OK. It's cultural.
I mean, if your mother was told
to birth in the hospital and she had a scary event in the
hospital, probably caused the term is zyatrogenic, probably
caused by the treatment that she was getting.
She was induced for no reason. The baby didn't like it.
She had an emergency C-section and she thinks, thank God I was
in the hospital because what would have happened if I'd been
at home? We're not realizing that none of
that would have ever happened at home.
So she has this experience and she passes this experience on
down to her daughters, and her sons for that matter.
And so when they grow up and they get married, they know what
mom's experience was, they know what grandma's experience it
was. And now we've got 4 generations
of women that had forgotten what mammals know.
Exactly. So when we were in, I said to
you at the beginning that we went in a Roach.
We we went to the Kruger National Park, which is our our
major game park. And I keep saying this, but it's
definitely one of the most beautiful places in the world.
And while we were looking at at giraffes and elephants and
things she said to me, my wife said to me when they give birth,
they don't have hospitals. They just go and find a quiet
place and give birth. But why do we as humans require
7 people around the woman and she must get on her back and
it's lights and it's and it's all sorts of instrumentation.
Something is wrong. Yeah, you think that, you think
that every woman would have that intuition that something is
wrong. But it just goes to show you how
powerful fear is in in driving you away from what you what you
believe is commonsensical and what your intuition tells you.
When mammals give birth. I know you know this, but maybe
your listeners don't know this. They go off to a quiet place and
they go off by themselves. You know, the other cows don't
come around and ask the cow that's in labor how she's doing.
And they don't restrict her intake.
They don't take away her food and water.
They don't immobilize her. They don't strap her down to to
the, the, the floor of the barn. You know, if the cow wants to
walk, the cow walks. If the cow wants to roll or lie
down, the cow rolls your lies down.
Doesn't lie on a Beck. And what?
Yeah. And what?
They never lay flat on their back and do that sort of thing.
And when they're ready to give birth, no one is around and the
baby comes out, it falls into the dirt.
It's not a sterile procedure. Matter of fact, it's better that
it's not. That's the whole point.
Baby's immune systems are starting to form in utero, but
they're you know, but 80% of your immune system comes from
the bacteria in your gut. If you're colonized with the
wrong bacteria that aren't, you know, if you're, if you're
brought out by a sterile C-section, taken to a nursery,
the bacteria you're being colonized with are not the ones
that nature design. And in the in the wild, no one
rushes in to cut the umbilical cord.
As a matter of fact, if you watched an elephant or Jaff give
birth, what happens? Baby falls on the ground, the
cord snaps. Does the baby elephant bleed to
death? No, of course not.
And maybe the fall is actually good for them.
Maybe it startles them and wakes them up.
Who knows? But nature has designed a
system. If it didn't work, that animal
would become extinct. So it works really, really well.
Now people will say, well, what happens if Well, yeah, that's
there's always going to be an exception and you're always
going to have a problem. But and you and if you if you
know some, some farmers will lose a sheep that's in labor,
it'll die. So they may help that sheep,
they may reach up and pull out that baby because they know what
to do, right. But if you look at the hospital
system we have now, despite all of that medical technology,
we're still losing mothers and babies.
So it's not, there's no perfect system.
There's no system that says, you know, if you follow our
instructions, you'll have a perfect outcome.
The the medical model is kind of sold that way, Jeremy.
It's sold that, you know, if you're in the hospital, you're
only 30 feet away from an operating room, but the
likelihood of you needing that operating room is increased A
hundredfold simply because you're you're in the hospital
and you're being treated in an anti mammalian way.
You're not allowed to eat, you're not allowed to move,
you're constantly interrupted. You have these belts on, you're
getting vaginal exams, which increase your risk of infection
and they're uncomfortable. You have to be in a bed.
By the way, here's a this is this is just a typical story.
If you go to a hospital and you go into a labor room, what's the
center of the labor room? What's in the center?
The bed. The bed.
OK, Anybody who's ever gone to a home birth, ask them when they
walked into the home birth, did they ever find the mother laying
in bed? No, there's candles and and and
and this music, and they're on the floors.
They're in the shower. They maybe they're on all fours
on the bed, but they're certainly not laying on the bed.
You never see it, but the hospital puts a bed in the
center of the room because what do hospitals do?
They treat sick people and sick people need to be in bed.
And so when you just even the psychology of walking into a
labor room and seeing the bed in the center tells you what
they're thinking, because home birth and mammals would never,
you know, wouldn't just they don't just go on your bed and
lay there prone waiting for somebody to do something to
them. That's just not how it's done.
So your, your wife was right to look at these things and then it
clicks in her head. Why it doesn't is because it's
because of our culture and because of our education that's
made it seem like it's a valuable thing to be in the
hospital. And by the way, the reason it's
so valuable, it's not because it's good for the patient, it's
good for the system. It makes a lot of money.
And whether you're in socialized medicine or not, your hospital
gets paid. Just the payer is different and
you're in a socialized system. The government pays, but the
hospital bills the government for everything it does.
So for every C-section they do, they get paid more than if they
do a vaginal delivery. For every baby that goes into
the newborn intensive care unit, they get paid more than if a
baby goes on to mom's chest and they don't get to do anything to
that baby. So what is the incentive of
people running a hospital who are trying to make a profit to
lower their intervention rate? There isn't one.
It's all backwards. We should start rewarding people
in hospitals that have a lower C-section rate.
They should get paid more per delivery.
The lower your C-section rate is, they should.
Go ahead. Sorry.
Go on. Oh, I could go on forever.
You go ahead. No.
Well, OK, so so let's just create some some sort of
context, because whenever you talk about a home birth, the
very first response is that it's more dangerous than a hospital
birth. Oh, you're asking me what I
think about that? Yes.
Is it true? Yeah, it's absolutely not more
dangerous. As a matter of fact, though, the
world literature doesn't support that.
It's more dangerous. It's it's exactly the opposite.
Again, hyperbole and lying is what is what tyrannical people
do to get control of you. They're, you know, they're
they're making they're, they're they're making it up now.
Is home birth for everybody? No, of course not.
There are certain things that you should not be doing at home,
but informed decision making is for everybody.
It should be everybody's decision to decide where I want
to give birth, how I want to give birth, and who the hell I'm
going to invite into my birth space.
All right. When you go to the hospital, you
have strangers. That's, that doesn't make a
mammal feel comfortable. A mammal needs to feel safe.
When a mammal is laboring, whether it's your dog, a cat or
a, a deer or or a farm animal and a predator approaches or
little kids run into the room where there's a forest fire or
brush fire, like like I just had, the mammal is going to stop
contracting. It's going to put out adrenaline
and it's going to get up and it's going to run away.
That's, that's how nature ensures the best chance of
survival. So when you scare people into
saying that it's not safe at home and and that that's
propaganda, it's the safest place you can possibly be for
most women, because that's how mammal, mammalian birth is
designed, is to be done basically alone by, you know, in
a safe place. But one of the driving factors
is pain, so they go, well, I'd rather go to the hospital so
they can reduce the pain. Pain is something that again,
you, if you, if you emphasize it all right, it, it, it becomes
sort of of a focus again, you can make people focus on the
wrong thing. First of all, there's two things
about pain. First of all, you know, I wrote
AI wrote a blog once when blogs were still a thing called labor
is not a toothache. And because a lot of doctors
will say, well, you wouldn't get a tooth pulled without
novocaine. Why would you have a baby
without an epidural? That kind of thinking just tells
you how obtuse these people are. They don't understand.
Because if you really understand biology and you understand
evolution and whether you believe in creation or not isn't
important here that I'm talking about.
You know, if you believe in evolution, then bad things tend
to evolve away and, and, and things that are beneficial tend
to become more common. That's how it works.
That's why some insects look like sticks, right?
It makes it more likely they're going to survive.
So when you have a woman that is in labor, you have to ask
yourself, why is labor painful? Because it doesn't behoove a a
mammal in the wild to be moaning or making noise because it's
going to attract a predator. So mammals have learned to be
quiet in the wild, but we know that their labor is still
painful. So this is a theory can't be
proven because no one's going to study it.
But maybe labor is painful for a reason, because every time you
experience discomfort, you're and these again, these are short
little surges, They last 30 to 60 seconds and then you get a
couple minutes of a break and then you do it again.
It allows your body to recharge its its hormones and recharge
its neurotransmitters, recharge its receptors and gives you a
little bit of a break. But this pain, when you have it,
you're secreting things. You're secreting endorphins,
which are your body's opiates. You're secreting oxytocin, which
is making your contractions happen, but it also makes you
feel warm and loved and bonded. You're secreting maybe some
cortisol because it's stressful. It helps you deal with stress.
You're secreting adrenaline. You're secreting a lots of
different hormones. They help you get through that
every three minute surge that you feel.
OK. So if you take that away and you
don't feel anything, great, now you don't feel anything.
But here's the thing, you have a passenger, you have a partner in
this whole thing. And nature has designed a
system. It's a beautiful Symphony that's
going on between mother and baby for nine months of passing
things back and forth. You know, maybe not verbal
communication. I mean, mom may be singing to
her baby, but baby's not singing back.
But, but there's, there is a hormonal communication and
biochemical communication and probably electrochemical
communication, things we don't even understand auras and things
like that that are going on between mother and baby who are
In Sync. This, this beautiful thing is
growing inside her body. She's communicating with it.
And then suddenly labor starts, whether it's induced or whether
it starts on its own. And the baby's world is rocked
because for nine months, the baby's been happy as a clam,
living inside a little ball, floating around, talking to mom,
doing its thing and, and, and all of a sudden now its will
world is tightening every 3 minutes.
And maybe as it starts to descend its butt or its head is
starting to get squeezed and that's a little uncomfortable.
Or maybe the water breaks and now it's really getting squeezed
and it's having to go through a small tunnel, right?
Well, if mom is in communication with that baby by sending that
baby endorphins and oxytocin. And maybe some adrenaline and
cortisol every 3 minutes, a little waft if it gets to the
baby and the baby goes all right, I'm feeling better
because I'm getting, I'm feeling oxytocin, I'm feeling loved.
And I'm getting moms endorphins. That's, you know, that's like
using some fentanyl, only it's safer.
OK. And his baby's getting all these
things and it's, and it feels like it's comfortable.
And I, I use the term it, it, it's aware that mom is there.
There's mom. I'm feeling OK, I'm safe now.
You give the mom an epidural. She no longer feels any pain.
The baby is still feeling pain. All right.
Maybe the contractions even space out a little bit.
So then they start artificial oxytocin like Syntosin or
Pitocin or whatever you call it in South Africa or Europe.
Europe, I think it's Syntosin. And so now the contractions
might even be closer together than they would have been
naturally. And they're strong.
And there's no mom to communicate to the baby that
it's OK. And so then the baby begins to
see, you begin to get stressed out and you get to see that on
the fetal heart rate tracing. And you see the baby's heart
rate rising or you start to see decelerations.
What they call a category 2 tracing and a category 2 tracing
makes doctors nervous. And So what do doctors do?
They say your baby's not tolerating labor.
I think we should need to do AC section.
Every time. What's that?
Every time. Yeah, well it's the number one
reason for C sections now. It used to be a rest of
dilatation or the rest of dissent.
Now it it and or fetal distress. It's not even fetal distress
anymore because they don't even know what a category 2 tracing
means. It just means they're the
doctor's uncomfortable or the nurse is uncomfortable and they
say, let's get this baby out and they get and they do AC section
and the baby comes out with good Apgar scores.
And then they think they saved the baby when what all they did
was they caused this baby to be in an unnatural situation
outside of communication with its mother and interrupting
hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary design and
thinking that, you know, we did a good thing.
And then wanting to force that upon women who choose to try to
do it a different way, like home birthing.
So the point being is that labor is probably painful for a
reason. And so don't look at it as pain.
Look at it as I mean, that's what hypno birthing is all
about. That's what these other things
that help you to decide orgasmic birth, to help you navigate down
that path and think of it in a different way.
And if you think of it as that every time you're having that
uncomfortable feeling, and again, maybe I'm diminishing it
a little bit. Maybe it's really it could be
really, really uncomfortable, but you're doing something good
for your baby and maybe let that sink into your brain and you'll
you'll you'll cope. I mean, if, if for instance,
just recently, like I said, I had, I, I was telling you before
we started, I had a brush fire that was 50 yards from my house
and the smoke was really thick. And if I'd had anybody in the
house that I needed to get out, I would have gone right back in
and gone and, and, and choked on the smoke and maybe could burn
my skin to save my pets. If I had children.
I'm, you know, they're, they're all grown up now.
My grandchildren were here. I would have, I would have done
anything I could have to save my children.
So that's how mothers feel about their baby.
So if they think of it in a different way, if they start
thinking of it and is that what this discomfort is doing is
helping me help my baby to navigate this process, which
nature designed. And it's so important for babies
to navigate this process. There are fetal reflexes that
the baby uses to work its way down the canal.
And when they don't have the opportunity to do that because
they're ripped out by caesarean section, then those fetal
reflexes sometimes don't integrate into into more
childhood reflexes. And then babies have issues like
ADHD and bed wetting. And we did a whole podcast on on
fetal reflexes. So.
I think we listened to it. It's all connected.
It's all connected and the medicalized system doesn't
understand that because all that matters to them is getting that
live baby out. But that's the point right
there. That's right there.
But but Doctor Stu, it's just about getting the baby out.
Yeah, Jeremy, it is because if you have a baby, a healthy baby,
what are you crying about? What are you so sad about?
It's just one day in your life. Get over it.
I mean, this is what this is what I'm.
I'm not making this stuff up. These are in the letters that
people write to me all the time. That why, why, why are you so
upset? Your baby's healthy.
You're healthy. Yeah.
Well, you know what now? I got a scarred uterus.
I got to worry about all my other future babies.
I didn't get the experience that I wanted.
But to the medicalized birth system, how a woman gives birth
doesn't matter to them, but it is one of the most important
things in a woman's life. A woman will remember the birth
of her child till the day she dies.
She'll remember everything about it.
She may not even remember her kids name when you get there
when she reached a certain point in life, but she will remember
every moment of that birth. And then and then doctors will
say, well, how you know it's not important how you gave birth.
They don't know anything. These doctors, these are the
experts supposedly in my field. And I will tell you the word
expert has lost all meaning like safe and effective has lost all
meaning or like evidence based has lost all meaning or standard
of care as as these things have no meaning anymore because the
standard of care can be terrible.
And who defines what the standard of care is?
And evidence based birth is only as evidence based.
Evidence based medicine is only as good as the evidence that's
in it. And if you have crappy
scientific papers that are only looking for outcomes like
neonatal death and neonatal morbidity, then then the
evidence is crappy and they ignore evidence to the contrary.
Like you said earlier, the home, they're telling you home birth
is dangerous. Well, there's plenty of evidence
to say that that's not true. So if you're being going to be
an ethical, honest physician and a woman's asking you a question
about birthing, you should give them all the information and let
them decide. You should not skew your
counseling to funnel them down the path you want them to go.
But that's right, there is another very important point.
So thanks to you, my wife and I changed our whole strategy
during during her pregnancy. So let me give you an example.
So after, after we had listened to your number of your podcast
episodes, we went now I think it was about she was about 6 months
pregnant, Stu, and we sat down with the Guyani and, and he
said, look, your baby's head's looking a bit big.
I just want to point out that C-section might be, might be
something to think about, not saying what you must do, but you
know, think about it. When we left, she said to me, I
want to change Ghani's because I think that he is going to fear
me into a decision that I don't want to do when the time comes.
And, and we, that's what she did.
She, she changed Ghani's. She said, I can see what he's
doing. He's trying to plant these ideas
in advance. And now knowing that she talks
to friends of hers who are pregnant or have just had
babies. And also, yeah, my, my baby's
head was too big. We had to do AC section.
And I'm thinking how is it possible?
Well, I maybe they went to the French Bulldog School of
Medicine, OK. But I mean, that's what you
hear. And and then the other problem
is hindsight. So no doctors going to come
after the fact and say, well, you know what, we didn't
actually need to do AC section. No, they don't.
They don't. And and and and now the baby's
healthy and done. So we're like, OK, so let's just
carry on. Yeah, the gaslighting and
gaslighting is a term that's, you know, been overused lately.
But but the gaslighting that goes on by these doctors is, is
legion. It's it's, it's everywhere.
It's, you know, again, they will skew their counselling to funnel
you down the path. You know, if you come in for
your first visit, you're 35 years old, immediately they tell
you, you got a problem because you're a geriatric pregnancy,
right? They, they, they plant these
seeds of doubt because that makes you easier to manipulate
toward the end. And the truth is, and I will
challenge any physician to sit on a stage with me for two hours
in front of a live audience and say otherwise.
They are all very scared of what they're doing and they've been
indoctrinated to fear birth. They've been indoctrinated to
fear being sued. They they don't understand the
mammalian amount. None of none of it because
pretty much everything that I learned in residency program is
not true, whether it comes to breeches or twins.
But I wanted to talk before we even go off in a different
tangent. I want to talk a little bit
about the about the Doctor Who's who never thinks they did an
unnecessary caesarean section. These people have to actually
believe that 70 to 80% of women in your country, in your, in
that part of your, of your country cannot deliver a baby
vaginally. And in order to convince
yourself that within a generation or two, women's
bodies have massively changed and with babies, heads have
massively grown, you have to, you have to be a, a fan of
fiction because it, it's not possible.
It doesn't make any sense to think that that's the case, that
a woman would grow a baby inside of her.
That would that would come out, that wouldn't come out.
That's like the whole thing about viruses.
Viruses don't want to kill the host.
They want the host to be able to spread them someplace else.
If women grew babies inside of them, that would kill them in
labor. That wouldn't be a very smart,
you know, evolutionary path to follow.
So here's the scary thing. I'm not a fan, and probably you
aren't either of the World Health Organization.
But the World Health Organization has said that when
the C-section rate rises toward 10%, there is some benefit to
that. But once it goes beyond 10%,
there is no benefit to that. They don't go as far as saying
there's detriment, but they say there's no benefit to AC section
rate in a population over 10%. So let's just say it should be
10% and let's just say it's 70% in your country.
So let's figure this out for a second.
Let me think about this for a second.
So 60% of women are having C sections that are probably not
beneficial to them, which we would be defined as unnecessary.
So I don't know how many babies are born in your country every
year, but you can do the math and figure that out.
But there's thousands and thousands if not 100,000 women
every year who are bringing unnecessary major abdominal
surgery and no one is complaining no insurance
companies complaining they're paying for it or your
government's paying for it. No, if there were unnecessary
knee surgeries or or eye surgeries or gallbladder
surgeries, yeah, people would be upset about that and the and
whoever's paying for that would be would say that would start
denying those payments because you're doing unnecessary
surgery. Yet nobody says anything about
these unnecessary C sections. But here's the scary thing
Jeremy, if 50, sixty, 80% of C sections being done are
unnecessary, and they are right, they are, I can, you know, I
could take the time and prove it if I knew your, your country
stats, but they are unnecessary. But here's the question, who's
doing them? Because as you said, no doctor
goes home at night to their spouse and says hey honey, guess
what I did today? I did 2 unnecessary C sections.
No, every C-section he does is unnecessary.
That 7080% of them are unnecessary.
So the only way to cope with that is something called
cognitive dissonance. It has to be, you know, they
have to find a rationale to to say that oh, the World Health
Organization is wrong or I'm not doing the unnecessary ones.
That guy over there, That guy over there, he's doing the
unnecessary ones. But what that guy over there
saying, he's saying this guy over here is doing the
unnecessary ones and nobody takes responsibility for it.
And hundreds of thousands of women are having, are being
butchered for no reason and being denied the experience of
giving birth as nature design. And their babies are being
altered for all time because they're not developing the
reflexes that they're supposed to have.
They're not experiencing what nature had designed.
Their, their microbiome is altered, their hormonal
connection is altered, their bonding and breastfeeding are
altered. Mothers postpartum depression
rates are higher. All these things are being, it's
a cascade. I mean, after they do a cascade
of interventions, we have a cascade of problems that occur
that no one is addressing or they're trying to address on the
far end by oh that woman's depressed, let's give her a SSRI
medication. How about we don't get her
depressed in the 1st place by letting her deliver vaginally?
How about we go to what they call the root cause and let's
let's solve the problem. Let's figure out why think our
outcomes are so bad and do something different.
But it's very lucrative for the people running the system.
And most of the doctors now are not independent souls anymore.
They are just hogs in a, you know, machinery.
They're paid salaried employees working a shift.
Why do they care? We, so we ended up with a
midwife at here at home and and what my wife said afterwards is
that the midwife knows so much more than the gyne.
Midwives do know more about normal birth.
That is their expertise. The OBGY NS know more about
problems and and sometimes they're really good at it.
The problem is, is that they see everything as a problem.
The the American College of OBGYN, which is you have, you
probably have your same organization in South Africa in
one of their guidelines and probably more than one, but one
I found specifically and it had it was just had to do with
influenza in pregnancy, but they were talking and the abstract
starts out with this sentence. Pregnancy itself is a high risk
condition. Therefore influenza in pregnancy
is potentially more more damaging or something to that
nature. But the first part of that
sentence is pregnancy itself is a high risk condition.
If that is the way that modern medicine sees pregnancy, that's
the prism they're looking through, then it gives you a
little understanding into the mentality of those that are
teaching the next generation of doctors to do this thing.
Pregnancy itself is a high risk condition, all right?
If that's how they see it, that's how they treat it.
That and then it makes them nervous and scared and therefore
they project that onto the women and it gets propagated and
propagated and propagated. Pregnancy itself is a normal,
normal bodily function. Occasionally it goes awry, but
so does breathing. So does digestion.
We we don't consider breathing or digestion to be a high risk
condition. Unless you're running into a
smoke filled house, then it might be.
But. But just for, just for clarity,
you're not saying that there's no need for the hospital because
it is there to serve a purpose, right?
Of course, of course, the problem is the the financial
problem is that if we took women out of the hospital that didn't
need to be there, then hospitals wouldn't be able to keep their
maternity wards open. And we need the maternity wards
to be open because they do do miracles there.
They do save people's lives there.
But as the World Health Organization and, and many other
experts who I trust a lot more than them say maybe it's 10%,
maybe 15% of the time a woman needs medical attention.
Some things that they would need absolute medical attention would
be if a woman has a placenta previa, that's not something you
can be delivering at home without great risk to mother and
babies lives. Some woman has severe
preeclampsia, right? That's something where the baby
needs to be delivered because the women could suffer seizures
and other metabolic problems or, or even die from that sort of
thing. Those those are kind of things,
not breech. I mean, that's a common 1 you
often hear. Yeah, but my baby hasn't turned.
Right. But breech is not a reason that
you have to birth in the hospital.
As a matter of fact, breech is a reason to stay out of the
hospital simply because nobody in the hospital generally knows
what to do. So they will immediately go to a
caesarean section for breech baby, even if the breech is
beginning to come out of the vagina, the butt or the legs are
sticking out of the vagina. They'll panic.
They don't know what to do. You know, there's a documentary
that people can look at called Heads Up, The Disappearing Art
of Breech Delivery. And in that documentary, there's
an actress named Miranda Bakarin, and she's in the TV
series Homeland. And she was in what's that
superhero movie with Ryan Reynolds where he's wearing the
red suit. What's that called?
Deadpool. Deadpool.
Yeah. She's so people know who she is.
And she had a breech baby. And she talks about the fact
that when because she had a practitioner in a hospital where
they did breach deliveries, when she came into the hospital, she
said, I came in the hospital, my membranes were ruptured.
I'm breached. There's meconium.
That would freak out 95% of hospitals in the world.
But what, what she was greeted with was, oh, so you must be
with Doctor Wu, we'll call him. Let's get you settled in, blah,
blah, blah. Because that was a hospital
that's familiar with breach delivery.
Most of the other hospitals would be panicked and they
couldn't get you under general anesthesia fast enough to get
that baby out by caesarean section.
Breech is not a indicate not an indication to be in the
hospital. If a hospital has a great
service and has great people there, fine.
But hospitals are not going to offer you a vaginal breech
delivery in a Safeway of doing it.
Breech delivery should be done in upright positioning most
often. Most hospitals don't know how to
deliver a baby if you're not on your back with your legs up in
stirrups. They don't understand the
Physiology, they don't understand the mechanisms, they
don't know what they're what they're doing.
So you're more likely to have a problem if you have a breech
delivery in the hospital than if you have it at home, right?
If there's a real problem, yes, theoretically you could, you
know, then you could be closer to an operating room where they
might be able to do something. But at what cost?
At what cost are we sectioning all breeches when really, you
know, you're saving about one in every thousand babies over a
vaginal delivery of a head down baby and that those numbers are
from the Royal College of OBGYN's Green top guidelines
from 2017 if people want to look them up.
So you're sectioning 1000 women to save one baby.
Now, if that's your baby, that makes OK, fine.
But. What are we doing to the other
999 women? We're putting them, their baby
and their future babies at greater risk than we did if we
would have let that woman deliver vaginally with a breech
baby. They don't understand that
because they're they're taught to fear breach.
More than more than 98% of breaches worldwide are delivered
by caesarean section. In in our practice, I think we
had a 7% C-section rate and 75% of twins worldwide are delivered
by caesarean section and our practice.
Our C-section rate for twins was 8.7%.
Sure. What did?
We do differently, we just trusted nature's design and I
was lucky that I trained in an era where the skills were just
considered a very part of normal teaching.
Breach and twin skills was was normal when I was a resident in
early 1980s. Now it's not taught anymore.
It's rare that a resident goes through a residency program, you
know, not even not seeing a breach, let alone even possibly
doing a breach that's so unlikely to happen.
And that's, that's a shame. That's, that should be a shame
and a stain on medical doctors who are training the future
generations of doctors. Because one out of every 20
women who walk into your office who are pregnant will have a
breech baby. And so you're an expert in
pregnancy and you don't know how to take care of one out of every
20 women that walk into your office.
How embarrassing is that, let alone just bad?
When we walked away from the from the from the OBGYN, my wife
said to me, did you notice how much he spoke about being sued?
Yeah, well, if if that, if your doctor talks like that, you did
the right thing. The first thing you do is is
find a new find a new practitioner.
And I would recommend that even if you plan to deliver in the
hospital with an obstetrician that you get some of your
prenatal care with a midwife. And again, be careful about
choosing your midwives because some midwives are becoming very
medicalized as well. So it's not just the title that
makes a difference. It's it's how they practice
because the title midwife is being Co opted by the medical
cartel as well. But you're.
Right, my point was, my point was protocol.
Yeah, the protocol. Is is is dominating everything
now? Yes, the medical model works on
on algorithms, and if you deviate from the algorithm,
you're more likely to get sued. This is a terrible way to live.
It's a terrible way to practice. One of the things I feel for my
OB colleagues, I mean, they have to take a a major part of the
responsibility because they've let it happen.
So you can't absolve them of all responsibility.
But I feel for them because they live in a world where they're
under threat all the time. Yeah, something goes wrong.
Then they get. We know it will, we know it will
that always, something always will go wrong.
And then the idea that your career could end on a bad
outcome is a terrible way to live.
And, and I don't think that most of my most obstetricians that
are practicing these days knew that when they went into medical
school or residency and chose that as a field.
I think they really chose it to do good because it's a very
joyous form of medicine. But how many of your
obstetricians actually act like they're feeling joyous?
Not very many. They act sort of stressed.
They're stressed out and it's a horrible way to live.
And, and how do I know that? Well, because happy people don't
treat people badly. Happy people don't say to
people, I think the baby's head's too big.
I think that you know you you choosing a vaginal is probably a
bad idea. Or you've got narrow hips.
You've got narrow hips or, you know, or just even being
condescending to them. I mean, why is it so important
for you to have a vaginal delivery or, you know, we all
want to, we all want to have the birth that we want, but you
know, at least we'll have a healthy baby, Happy, healthy
people don't talk to other people like that.
So something has happened psychologically to my
profession. They've been under a sort of a
mass formation where they've given up their individuality to
be part of the collective just to keep their head down and
collect their paycheck. And it's, it's a horrible thing.
And that's, that's why I'm always nervous when I hear that
hospitals are bringing in midwives or bringing in doulas.
Doulas are like non medical birth assistants because if the
hospital's bringing them in, that means they're being paid by
the hospital. If you're paid by the hospital,
who is your loyalty to? Who's your fiduciary duty to?
And the answer is it's conflicted.
Now, when you're a private doula or private midwife or even a
private OB, you could be loyal to the patient.
You may have to answer to the medical board, but your loyalty
is to the patient. But when you work for a hospital
system and say the hospital system says we don't do breech
babies here, but you just took a seminar, they found out how easy
breech is to do and you want it. And the woman one has a breech
baby. You can't tell her that because
if you tell her how easy it is to do a breech delivery and how
safe it really is, you might get fired.
So you're, you're right there, there these medical legal
concerns, these these conflicts of interest, they weigh heavily
on the system. And the person who suffers from
it is the patient. Can I read you?
I've got a very long e-mail, so I'll just I'll summarize it, but
I want to read an e-mail that I received and I actually might
forward forward this to you because it relates to you.
It's probably just like my inbox every day.
Go ahead. But so she says, yeah, with the
help of your podcast with Doctor Stew and Doctor Stew's podcast
and a class that I took called Pain Free Birth in Brackets.
She's a doula who teaches about natural childbirth.
I was able to give birth at home unexpectedly and by myself.
I'm from the US but I'm living in the UAE where home birth is
illegal and I was planning on giving birth in a hospital with
midwives. My contractions started early in
the morning, exactly on my due date.
I went about my day, blah blah blah.
She explains her day and she says during a contraction my
water broke and everything ramped up from there.
The baby was born 30 minutes later.
Nothing I did in those thirty minutes gave me relief.
I tried sitting in the tub. I was immediately uncomfortable
so I told my husband to run the shower.
I stood in the shower letting the waterfall on my back and I
tried my best not to tense my mouth, face or any part of my
body and to just breathe. And she says I And then I
started crowning. My husband walked away for a
moment to try and reach the doula, who was also a trained
midwife and she was on her way. I pushed once more and the baby
came out. Well, thank you for thank you
for reading that story. I mean, the a couple things
stand out to me. The fact that home birth is
illegal, it's like, yeah, that one, that one jumps out at me.
I wonder, did she get arrested? I mean, what happened to her?
Do we know? I can always e-mail and ask her.
No, I'd be curious to see what happened.
There's so many stories I could I could share with you.
I, I hear stories all the time. Maybe you do 2 of they call
human interest stories. They're on the news at night
where a woman delivers on the side of the road and maybe a
passerby or helps her have her baby in the back seat.
And then they show her, of course, then what they do with
her is they take her to the hospital, right?
The baby's already out. Placenta's out.
Why are we going to the hospital?
But that's, that's what they that's what they do because it's
culturally that's what people think they they need.
They need to do that. But the story begins earlier
than that when she called her doctor and it's her third baby
and he doctor and she says, my contractions are right on top of
each other. And the doctor says, OK, come to
the hospital. What the doctor should have said
is, wow, that's great. Just hang tight.
I'll be right over. Why are you making a woman who's
contracting like crazy get in a car and drive someplace?
You would never do that again. Gets back to the mammalian birth
model. You, you would never do that.
Your dog's in labor. It's booming labor.
You pick your dog up, you put it in the car, you strap it into a
car seat and you drive to the local vet station.
No, you would never do that. So the idea that that we we
interfere and that when you leave it alone, this is sort of
what happens. And it's not always is as easy,
it doesn't always go smoothly. Clearly nothing I'm saying is
100%, but most births, if you just leave them alone and if you
have the confidence and trust in the right mindset, then birth
will progress as nature design. And this woman's story is great
because I'm sure that had she tried to rush to the hospital,
there would have been a panic when she got there because the
baby's head would have been coming out and nobody would have
helped her. They would have all been
screaming up the chain of command for who's you know who's
going to help her. And nobody would have just
stopped and been human and just looked at her in the eyes and
got her eye contact and said, look at me, you're fine.
Everything's going to be fine. Let's get this baby out.
Great. They just and and and and talk
to her like that as opposed to acting panicked.
It's almost as it's a virtue signaling you have to the more
panicked you are, the more you obviously care.
It's it's the opposite, but. But when we when, so when my
wife was pregnant, we went for hypno birthing classes.
And for those who don't know what hypno birthing is,
Stuart's, it's basically just a way of thinking.
It's just changing your mindset. That's all it is.
It's not hypnosis or anything. Woo, woo.
And she, she was telling us that the whole point of not being
stressed or nervous or scared is that those responses are, are
flight responses. And so therefore those will
lengthen the labour because, because you need to get out of
that situation. And so the baby can't come yet.
And, and so and, and, but, but that's what the whole thing is
about. Then then that's when the
hospitals come in and say, but don't worry, we're there for
you. And and so the whole thing
becomes inverted. Well, it does.
Pretty much everything they do to you when you show up at the
hospital is antithetical to the what I've decided what I've
described as nature's design, right when you interrupt A
mammal, all right, they put out adrenaline.
I said this earlier. Adrenaline caused the
contractions to space apart or even stop.
So when you're questioning a woman, you're asking her about
how many stairs she has in her house or you know, what did
grandma die from or what, what birth control are you going to
be using after you have this baby?
Like like that matters at this point in time.
No, it doesn't matter. But it's on the questionnaire
and we have to ask the questions in order to move on to page 2 so
we can get you admitted. This is this again, it's all
automated. It's all algorithmic.
When you go to the hospital, they want to put you on a
monitor. They want to have you change
into a hospital gown. What does a hospital gown
signify? That you're a patient, That
you're, that you're I'll why are you going to the?
It's the only thing we go to the hospital for, Jeremy that is for
a normal bodily function. Pretty much there isn't anything
else we go to a hospital for other than that as a normal
bodily function. You have to pee in a cup.
They have to draw blood on you. They, they, again, like I said,
they take your blood pressure. They do all these things to you
and then suddenly that you're on the monitor and your
contractions are 8 minutes apart when they were 3 minutes apart
and they can't figure that out. But you and I could because we
just took a mammal and we interrupted them and we scared
them and suddenly their contractions spaced apart.
That is basic mammalian Physiology, yet they don't
understand that. But now you're there at the
hospital and they say, well, your contract is based out
you're here. You're you know, you're almost
40 weeks. Why don't we just rupture your
membranes or why don't we just start, you know, augment
augmenting your labor? No, no, no, I'm not in good
labor. I'm going home.
Just go home. Don't you know?
That's why hiring a doula and staying home.
And if even if you want a hospital birth, don't show up at
the hospital till you're like ready to push.
There's far less chance that they can do something to screw
it up than if you show up when you're 2 to 3 centimeters
dilated and you're getting unnecessary vaginal exams.
And they're going to put you in the bed and they're going to put
those belts on you and they're going to interrupt you
constantly. And they're going to put a blood
pressure cuff on your arm that every hour it's going to pump up
in the middle of a contraction. And, and they're going to come
in and come asking you questions and the lights are going to be
on and, and you're going to hear noises in the hallway, right?
And you have to ask permission to go to the bathroom because
you're plugged into this machine and the nurse has to come in and
hook. And how undignifying is that?
Everything that they do to you, again, is not evidence based.
It is convenience for the hospital.
It makes it easier or generates revenue or, you know, does
things for the hospital's sake. None of that for your mother,
because when you go to a home birth, as we said earlier, you
never find the woman in a bed. You never start an IV
automatically. You never draw blood.
You may take your blood pressure one time when you show up, and
if it's normal, you probably won't take it again unless she
has some symptoms that tell you it might be reasonable to take a
blood pressure. You don't have to do it every 30
minutes or every hour simply because that's what the protocol
at the hospital says. They don't understand that
you're interrupting her. Leave her alone.
You know, there was a, there was a thing that came out a while
ago that they want to make hospitals more home like because
they were worried about competing with hospital with
home birthing. So in the administrator's mind,
that kind of mind, what do they think that means?
It means nice hardwood floors and some nice curtains.
It doesn't mean changing the policies and leaving the woman
alone and letting her get in a tub or a shower if she wants to.
And not being monitored all the time doesn't mean any of those
things. So stay out of the hospital.
If people have watched The Business of Being Born, I don't
know if you and your wife ever watched.
That movie, What's her? What's her name?
The the the presenter, the show host.
Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein. Yes, Ricki Lake.
Yeah, there's a scene in there where a mentor of mine, I never
got the chance to meet him, he's passed away now, named Mars and
Wagner, very bright guy. And he gives a monologue about
how in the 50s they X-rayed all all these women, They X-rayed
their pelvises to see if they were pelvises were big enough.
And they found it caused cancer in the children.
So they stopped doing that. And then they gave out
thalidomide. Thalidomide was a thing that was
supposed to be for hyperemesis, which was too much throwing up
and nausea caused babies in in England mainly to have limb
reduction defects where they had, you know, abnormal limbs.
And then they tried Cytotec for inducing laborers in women that
had previous cesarean sections. And they had a lot of ruptured
uteruses and a lot of babies died.
So he summarizes the whole little scene by saying, if you
want the best birth possible, if you want to, you know, have a
healthy baby, stay the hell out of the hospital, is what he
says. And he's right.
He's right. If you're a perfectly healthy
woman, you should stay the hell out of the hospital.
And you should get over your fear because your fear is
leading you down a path where you're going to have a 70%
C-section rate in your country. But now, OK, so Stu, I have to
bring this up because I've had this, this conversational arc
many times with, with, with different people over the last
year and a half or so. And this always comes up.
But well, look at the data. A child mortality went down
once, once childbirth went into the hospital.
And we and they have showed the industrial revolution stats and
all that sort of thing. Well, you can if you want to
compare it to 100 years ago, that's true.
But 100 years ago, we didn't know germ theory, we didn't have
antibiotics, we didn't have clean water and plumbing and
things like we have now. All right, stop that comparison.
Compare it to 50 years ago. Compare it to 1970.
The C-section in rate in your country in 1970 was probably
about 6%. How have the outcomes been since
1970 for your babies and your mother's?
And you will find, again, I don't know your country stats,
but I know my country stats, you will find that the neonatal
morbidity and mortality rate has not significantly changed.
The rate of cerebral palsy has not diminished.
The rate of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which is brain
damaged babies, has not diminished despite the C-section
rate going up 600% in my country, despite continuous
fetal monitoring which was supposed to tell us which babies
were at risk and therefore we were going to be able to save
those babies. Again.
These things were all put in place without ever seeing
whether they work first. This is like thalidomide or like
doing X-rays on women. These are all what are called
stage 1 thinking we're going to do something without actually
testing to see if it's safe. Now we live in a world where
we're giving pregnant women 6 vaccines while they're pregnant.
Yes my wife was. She was told to to get a flu
shot whilst was pregnant and she said no.
Yeah, flu Dtap, which is diphtheria, tetanus and
pertussis, COVID shot and now they want to give you a
respiratory syncytial virus shot.
None of which, by the way, none of which have ever been tested
for safety in a randomized, controlled, placebo-controlled
trial in anybody, let alone pregnant women, and none of
which have been tested giving him at the same time.
Five of these vaccines are recommended at 28 weeks.
Who does this kind of stuff? Who?
Why would you trust anybody who tells you to do that?
Who tells you as a pregnant woman?
Who tells you not to eat sushi? Yes.
But you can get 5 vaccines while you're pregnant.
Don't trust these people, they don't know anything.
I was one of them. I was that person who would have
told you those things back when, in the late eight 1980s when I
came out of my residency, until I was influenced by the
midwifery model of care and the midwives in my community.
And that was an incidental accident.
They asked me to take their transfers from home when I first
came into practice and I did it because I wanted to make money.
I didn't do it because I thought I wanted to help midwives or I
wanted to help home birth people.
I thought home birth was probably stupid.
I don't really remember, but I'm sure that I that's how I was
trained. So I did it because I wanted to
make money. I did it for the wrong reason,
but it led me down this path. It took a long, it took many
years to undo the training that I had, but here we are.
So something you said to me last year is, and it's difficult to
prove these things and and you hinted at it now in this
conversation, but a baby that goes through the birth canal
versus a baby that's AC section. Could have different outcomes
health wise later on, for example, attention issues and
and and other and other things that are very difficult to
pinpoint. But it's, it's, it's plausible,
isn't it? Yes, again, it's not every baby
that comes out through the vagina is going to be healthier
than every baby that's born by cesarean section.
That's not how statistics work. You know, every individual case
is different, but overall following nature's design, it's
just like, it's just like with viruses.
You're better off catching the virus and getting better than
getting a vaccine. You're better off following
nature's design. And, and when you're born
vaginally through a, through a normal labor process and you
colonize with the normal bacteria, getting a good auto
transfusion of your own blood and stem cells with delayed or
would call optimal cord clamping or it's actually no cord
clamping. I mean, in the, in the midwifery
model, we generally don't clamp the cord at all till the
placenta is out and in a bowl and maybe an hour later because
we don't want to disturb that first hour.
We leave the baby attached to what it's always been attached
to. And then eventually we cut the
cord just to get the placenta off the field.
But, but when you, when you do those sorts of things, you
don't, you don't mess with Mother Nature's design and you
end up with generally healthier kids.
We know that babies born by C-section have a slightly
greater risk of childhood asthma.
They have a slightly greater risk of, of diabetes.
They have a slightly greater risk of eczema and other
autoimmune disorders. We know that for a fact.
We know that they that they have a higher rate of not integrating
their reflexes, right? Not all babies, some babies do
great. So we can't really tell who's
going to do it. But we know that nature's design
is the best way to go for most women because it because nature
designed it over eons. And nature isn't stupid.
You know, there was an obstetrician, I think his name
is Errol Norwich and I, he should be forever ridiculed.
He was in a fake debate with a guy named Charles Lockwood and
they were talking about whether or not it was OK to induce all
women at 39 weeks, which would which two years later would come
out as the arrive trial, which you may have heard if you're in
your country where they think it's great to meddle with Mother
Nature every time at 30, you know, at 39 weeks, all babies
should be born in 39 weeks because again, all that matters
is a live baby in the bassinet. That's again that perfect theory
about that. But in this debate, which was a
fake debate, because the debate usually is between two people
that have different points of view.
Turns out these big, big guys both have the same point of view
and and they faked it. One pretended to have a
different point of view, but by the end they were both in
agreement that 39 week induction was a good idea.
And this doctor Norwich said something that I, that I still
think was one of the stupidest things I've ever said.
Unfortunately, the audience laughed and he said that nature
is a lousy obstetrician. And the and the audience laughed
because they weren't thinking. And I would say, thank God
nature's a lousy obstetrician because obstetricians are doing
lousy. Obstetricians aren't doing well.
He's so proud of the job that they're doing.
And then just look at where our outcomes are now.
Look at your country. Look at our chronic illness rate
in children. Look at our postpartum
depression rate. Look at our C-section rate.
Look at our induction rate. The rate of NICU admissions in
my country in the last 15 years has doubled.
Now, is that because we're doing badly and having bad babies?
Or is that because it's very lucrative to find ways to get
babies to go to the NICU? I don't know.
But either one of them is evil. Does that make sense?
The the rate of NICU admissions has doubled.
So either we're doing something wrong with all this mighty
medicine because it's not doubling because 1% of babies
are being born at home. That math doesn't fan out.
It's doubling because we're screwing up in the hospital or
we're not screwing up in the hospital.
But the hospital, in order to make money, is finding new
policies and new and new new ways to mandate that that this
baby, because it was born to this mother, has to be observed
in the NICU for a little while because NICU is big money for
hospitals. You know our our OBGYN, I say ow
as if it's as if I had any role. My wife's OBGYN, shall I say
it's. Yours right?
You're you're there. He made a very dark statement
and he wasn't trying to be cynical or anything, but he, it
was just very dark, he said. You know, I think in about 100
years time there will be no natural births.
I've heard that from Brazilian doctors as well.
I think that I think there's, I think he's wrong.
I think the pendulum has swung about as far as it's going to
swing. And the reason I feel that way
is because what the medical cartel is doing now is so
desperate. It's very typical at the, you
know, at at the end of the, of the life of something that they
cling to their model and push back even harder.
And there are states now, like I just spoke with somebody in
Norway yesterday. I did a podcast in Norway and
they're trying to ban free birth in Norway.
The medicalized birth model is lobbying the politicians in Oslo
to make free birth illegal because free birth is on the
rise. Free birthing is just basically
giving birth without anybody around you.
Yeah, without any any medical professional, usually not even
your partner, but yeah, but just you at home.
So but free birth is on the rise in in Norway.
So you and I would ask because we're inquisitive, we would ask
the question, well, why is free birth on the rise?
And if you answer the, if you ask the women who are doing free
birth, they say because we don't want to go to the hospital
because the hospitals suck. They don't say it that way, but
I'm, I'm paraphrasing there. So what do the hospitals do with
that information? Well, instead of saying, God, we
suck, we should try to fix what what's happening.
No, they try to quash people from having a choice of birthing
outside of the hospital, and they'll do it, Jeremy, in the
name of safety. It's not safe to have a free
birth. But I don't know that they know
what they're talking about and how they define safety because
it's clearly not safe to go to a hospital that has a 40 or 50%
C-section rate. It's not safe for mom, it's not
safe for baby, and it's not safe for mom's future babies to have
that kind of thing in Norway. So this is the kind of tyranny
that's going on. Instead of them looking in the
mirror at themselves and saying, you know, we're forcing women to
choose something that we think is dangerous.
They don't, but we think it's dangerous.
Maybe we ought to look at ourselves.
Why are women choosing something that we think is dangerous?
What are we doing that's causing that?
But no, they don't have any introspection like that.
They immediately wanted to just use use the the mighty fist to
hammer and make it illegal for these women to to choose to
birth at home. We were talking about our circle
of friends who've had babies and we got up to the number 10
before we reached first natural birth.
Yeah, it's frightening to me because we are changing the
species. We're changing the species.
There is such a thing as epigenetics and will Our young
females who are not exposed to mom's oxytocin and labour who
are are not born vaginally, will they in the future have more
difficult times having vaginal bursts?
Michelle O'dant, who's in his 80s now, very bright gentleman.
Some of you know him because he was also in the business of
being born. He's the Frenchman who they use
subtitles on because his accent is so thick.
He believes that the by the pre labor caesarean section, the
cesarean section that's scheduled electively before
labor starts, those female fetuses are never and males too
in their brain, but they're never exposed to mom's oxytocin.
They're never exposed to this love hormone, this bonding
hormone and that maybe that, that, that their little uteruses
in, in the fetus will not develop oxytocin receptors to
the same extent. And then they'll have more
trouble contracting when they grow up and they try to have a
baby. There's also some question of
whether or not you, you, you know, the, the rates of autism
and, and you know, autism, autism spectral disorders where
you, the failure to connect, the failure to make eye contact, the
failure to do things may have to do with how we give birth as
well. There's lots of so many other
environmental factors that may cause autism, but you don't see
autism in people born vaginally who haven't been vaccinated, who
aren't eating processed foods. You just don't, you don't, you
don't see that. It's extremely rare in in our
country. Here we have what's called the
Amish population. They're people that live by a
traditional way of life. They're ahead of the curve.
They are ahead of the curve. They eat healthy food, they
don't use modern medicine, they don't take medications, they
don't get vaccinated. And for the most part, and the
kids play in the dirt like your like your little baby was
crawling around in the grass and getting a rash.
It's great for them, makes them stronger.
You don't see these sorts of diseases in that people.
And then you have people like authors like Andy Wakefield and
Paul Thomas and now and now my friend Joe Walsh, we're putting
out books that basically say that the unvaccinated kids are
healthier in every aspect than the vaccinated kids.
And I would argue that babies born vaginally as a trend, not
always, but as a trend are going to be healthier than babies born
by caesarean section. Can I prove that?
No, I can't necessarily prove that.
But because no one's really studying to look at it, the
funding for studies in my country doesn't go to people
looking to undermine the, the ideology or the, or the way
things are done because they don't want to know.
So research and funding for research is corrupted completely
too, by the same big medical cartel that is profiting greatly
off of the lousy outcomes we have in obstetrics.
I'm just looking at looking at the time.
You and I could talk. We looked at I can't wait to
come to South Africa and hang out.
No, just just hang out with you. No, listen, this, this, I can
talk for hours on this because it, it, this isn't just a
conversation that's academics to you.
This, this literally affected my life and my wife's life and the
life of my child that that came into the world.
It's very significant more than anything else just about.
And I've got a very, very healthy child.
And it just blows my mind that if I think about the kids in
baby class that are his age, they're all sick and they've
still got marks on their arms from, from the from the vaccines
and they're constantly going in and out of clinics because
they're, they're getting sick. And my little boy has not been
sick and he's healthy. And it's just, it's just, it
seems like such a no brainer. Right and and those parents will
be fearful of your unvaccinated kid.
Yes. Yeah, their kids are vaccinated
and that's supposed to protect them from the diseases that your
kid might catch, which will make your kids stronger.
But if the vaccine works so well, then why are they fearful
of your kid? But I do have to ask the
question Jeremy, why is your 8 month old baby in class already?
Let's flip that all the notes. No, it's no, no, no.
It's just, it's just a, a, a group of moms with their babies
getting together. Yes.
Yes, he said class. And it's like, wait a minute, I
didn't know they had classes for babies.
No, no, no, no, months old. And once a month.
It's a genius. Yes, he's he's the head boy.
And then once a once a month, it's it's dad's turn.
To go to the to the, to go to the class.
Oh, OK. Yeah, it's baby.
Wait, wait till they get to be like 1 1/2 and two.
And you take them to the playground and they're playing
with running around. They're running through the
sprinklers and running down the slides and stuff like that.
My granddaughter just is about to turn 2 and I just, she's in
Louisiana and I just, I get to see her.
I go down there like several times a year and I just totally
in love. You know, that's the beauty of
having children because they get grandchildren eventually.
You hope anyway. All right, Doctor Stu, how can I
follow your work? Well, everything is birthing
instincts. So my website
isbirthinginstincts.com and my podcast is Birthing Instincts
podcast. We have a Patreon group.
We're over 1000 people now in our group.
We have different tiers, but every month we hold a peer
review. For birth workers, we hold AQ
and A once a month Bliss holds a what's called a village
prenatal. She was.
On my show too. Oh, you've had bliss.
Kim. Kim.
Yeah. Oh, no, not Kim.
No, I said. Bliss.
Oh OK, sorry, wrong person. Oh, oh, you said You might.
You thought I said Kim Biss. Yes, yes.
No no Bliss is my Co host on my podcast.
Oh, sorry, sorry. Oh, Kim Biss is amazing.
Yeah, she's amazing. Sad because she's finding all
these things with, with menstrual periods and
miscarriages and all that other stuff that she's finding.
Yes, but no, but that's how they find me.
If you wanted to join our Patreon group, we'd love to have
you. It's, you know, it's behind the
paywall. So we can say anything we want.
And there are different tiers. As I said, there are different
tiers. And if the higher tiers you get
to come and you get time with me and bliss, that sort of thing.
I'm missing something. But people, people will can find
it. Everything's on my website.
All the links to everything that I do is on my website.
Oh, I've I've I've written a book called Fearless Pregnancy.
It's right here, but it's old. You have to send that to me a
signed copy. Yeah, it's, it's old.
The last issue came out in 2010, some of us, and I wrote it.
So I wrote it before I was doing home birthing.
I wrote it when I was working as a collaborative Dr. with a
midwife. And some of the stuff is still
very relevant. I like to read it because I
think how differently I am now 15 years later.
And of course, the genetics chapter is completely obsolete
because this was before the advent of like a non invasive
prenatal screening, the blood test type stuff.
But it's still, you know, something that I love.
And I've got I've written 4 papers, one on home birthing,
one on breech home birthing, one on twin home birthing.
And then a case report about twins with entangled heads.
A breech first twin. That's fear.
That's everyone's biggest fear. And then why doctors won't allow
women to have a, a vaginal delivery of twin A is breech.
But that also is again, misguided to say the least.
It's very rare. The literature doesn't support
that. But there's this picture that
everybody sees and that scares the bejeebers out of everybody.
And I, I had it happened to me once and I was able to just
manage it because of my skill as being a breach practitioner and
knowing with through hands on experience what you can do when
you have a situation where something is stuck.
And just to simply the answer is you just reduce station, you
push things back up until because the pelvis is shaped
like this. And if you push things back up,
you've got more room to move things around.
But what will happen in a panic in a hospital setting with
somebody who doesn't know anything is they'll start
pulling on that baby. And then that's going to just
lead to a really bad outcome because they don't do this
training anymore. Sorry.
No, no, I was going to say I'm, I will echo listening to your
podcast because your podcast is, is what played a major, major
role in, in our in in the changing direction that that we
had. So I would strongly recommend
listening to to your podcast. On that note, Doctor Stu, thank
you for joining me. One more thing.
I forgot I do teach, I do teach 2 day seminars on breach and
twin skills and again you can find that on the website.
This is my passion right now. I'm sort of done with clinical
work because I, I, I don't want to really be on call anymore.
I did it for 40 years. It was hard, but I travel around
the world and I would love to come to South Africa and I would
love to be able to teach a class where it's two days.
We talk about twins and breeches and why things are the way they
are. And then we spend hours on
Sophie and her mom simulators, learning the skills of breech
and twin delivery. So I'm sorry to interrupt your
you know, go ahead, do it. Again.
Good. OK, well, let's do the outro
again. Doctor Stew, thank you for
joining me in the changes. You're welcome, Jeremy.
It's been a pleasure.