During today’s episode we dive into understanding birth–you won’t want to miss this one!
The Radiant Mission Podcast | Episode 26
Host: Rebecca Twomey @theradiantmission
Co-Host: Rachel Smith @rachelsmithsmith
Guest: Dr. Stu @birthinginstincts
Thank you for listening to The Radiant Mission podcast! We are on a mission to encourage and inspire you on your walk with Christ and as you journey through life.
In Episode 26 we have a very special guest as we dive into understanding birth! His name is Stuart Fischbein MD, also known as Dr. Stu, and he is a community-based practicing obstetrician and an associate of the American College of Obstetrics & Gynecology, published author of the book “Fearless Pregnancy, Wisdom & Reassurance from a Doctor, A Midwife and A Mom” and peer-reviewed papers Homebirth with an Obstetrician, A Series of 135 Out of Hospital Births and Breech birth at home: outcomes of 60 breech and 109 cephalic planned home and birth center births. Dr. Stu spent 24 years assisting women with hospital birthing and, for the last 12 years, has been a homebirth obstetrician who works directly with midwives. His website is www.birthinginstincts.com.
Dr. Stu travels around the world as a lecturer and advocate for reteaching breech & twin birth, respect for the normalcy of birth and honoring informed consent. Follow him on Instagram @birthinginstincts and at The Birthing Instincts Podcast with midwife Blyss Young on your smartphone app as he offers hope, reassurance and safe, evidence supported choices for those women who understand pregnancy is a normal bodily function not to be feared, simply desire common sense and who cannot find supportive practitioners for VBAC, twin and breech deliveries.
In This Episode on Understanding Birth with Dr. Stu (Part 1):
Dr. Stu’s transition from attending in-hospital births to his shift to home birth and working with midwives.
It was a process of being curious and questioning things. “Why are we doing that?”
In residency and medical school, you get beat down and stop asking questions. He thought the obstetrics model was the only way to do things. He did all the things that he looks back on now and says “why did I do these things?” Like immediate cord clamping, taking the baby to the warmer away from the mother, wearing a hazmat suit to catch a baby, a woman birthing on her back, administering Pitocin or c-sectioning. He was trained with these things, but started to see how wrong these things were over time.
He started working with home birth women and midwives and started to see that these women were well-informed and educated. They simply chose a different path. He started to look into things and learned that much of what he knew was wrong. Birth is a normal function of our bodies. He began truly understanding birth.
After about 10 years in private practice, he started a collaborative midwifery practice with two certified nurse-midwives in a hospital setting. For 15 years or so they had a great practice with low interventions and a c-section rate around 7%. Midwives are better at taking care of women than doctors are because they’re trained to take care of women where doctors aren’t.
Breech Birth
He delivered breech babies because he was trained to do so in medical school in the 1980s, though that training was waning due to some papers that had begun to come out. It was all about confirmation bias—they basically said we need a paper so we can do c-sections and suddenly there were papers coming out saying that c-section was breech than not. There was a paper with a lot of flaws that came out, but by the time it had been retracted the damage had been done.
“The educated pregnant woman is the bane of the existence of the current medical model. Because they don’t want people to ask questions.”
“They” are probably good people, but they’re in a system that doesn’t allow them individuality. Everything is done on an algorithm.
Analogy from “A Bug’s Life” about how the system is disrupted when a leaf falls in the middle of the ant line. The traditional birth system creates a lot of birth trauma because it isn’t based on understanding birth. Listen to Rebecca’s story on the Healing Birth Podcast: The Spiritual Battleground for Birth here.
Women considering home birth often ask “what if there’s an emergency?”
There’s a documentary coming out called Birth Time, 1/3 of women complain of birth trauma.
There is so much fear in birth. The reason women fear birth is because the medical model has projected their fear onto women.
When people ask that question, we need to consider how mammalian birth works. As Sarah Buckley likes to say, birth should be “quiet, safe, and unobserved.”
If you ever watch any other mammal when they’re in birth, they go to a quiet place, not to a busy street corner. And who goes with them? No one. And if they’re hungry they do something really amazing: they eat! If they’re thirsty, they would drink. You would never have your laboring dog sit in one place or duct tape it to the floor. And if little kids were running around the house, you’d tell them to leave the dog alone. When the babies come out, no one is rushing to cut the cord. You wouldn’t take the puppies away from their mother. As his co-host Blyss likes to say: “No one ever does a vaginal exam on a tiger at 7 centimeters.”
What we do to the human female is antithetical to nature’s design. You have to get in the car and drive to a hospital where you then have to sign papers that talk about death and consent forms about surgery. Then you go into a bathroom and change into a hospital gown and pee in a cup. (Why? It’s a billable charge). Then they draw blood. Then we strap you down and put monitors on, which have been shown to no effect other than raising the c-section rate. You don’t get to eat or drink. And you’re constantly interrupted.
In nature, what happens when there’s an interruption? The mammal’s adrenaline kicks in, they get up and run away, and only when they feel safe will labor ensue. So, when we take a woman from her home and drive to the hospital and go through the process just described, it’s no surprise she was contracting every 3 minutes at home and now it’s every 8 minutes, her adrenaline is pumping. She’s being interrupted. Then the cascade of interventions begins. Things can go wrong anywhere. Things go wrong in the hospital all the time. If you leave nature to its own accord, rarely does it go wrong suddenly. A well-trained midwife and educated parents can see it coming way ahead of time. No one guarantees a perfect outcome.
The maternity system in America and western countries like Australia and Europe is broken.
It’s not because 1-2% of women are giving birth at home.
It’s because 99% of women are having babies in a hospital system that isn’t designed to individualize care, to respect autonomy and decision making, to give informed consent. You’re a cog a wheel of a machine that has to make money to survive. And the fiduciary duty of the hospital is not to you. We need to understand that. They don’t care about you.
The foundation is shaky and they keep putting more scaffolding on it. If the foundation is shaky, the scaffolding is just going to collapse.
The individual people want to do the best that they can, but the system doesn’t allow it.
Bible Verses Mentioned on Understanding Birth with Dr. Stu (Part 1):
Ecclesiastes 11:5
“As you do not know the path of the wind,
or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God,
the Maker of all things.”
Resources Mentioned on Understanding Birth with Dr. Stu (Part 1):
- Learn more about Dr. Stu
- Website: www.birthinginstincts.com
- The Highwire with Del Bigtree
- Healing Birth Podcast
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