Before the First Breath: How Modern Medicine Preys on Birth
22 Interventions That Create the Problems They Claim to Solve (Part 1)
PREFACE
This essay was inspired by Dr. Amandha Dawn Vollmer's article "Birth is Not Broken, The System Is," which exposed the medical system's predatory relationship with mothers and babies. Her work crystallized something I'd long suspected: that modern obstetrics isn't just occasionally harmful—it's systematically designed to prey on women at their most vulnerable.
From the moment you're pregnant, you become a target. Every appointment, every test, every "routine" procedure is another opportunity for the system to insert itself between you and your baby. The interventions start before labor even begins and don't stop until well after birth. Each one creates problems that justify the next, turning a natural process into a medical crisis that generates profit at every turn.
This isn't about a few bad doctors or outdated practices. This is about an entire industry that treats women's bodies as defective and babies as products to be extracted, processed, and improved upon. The system doesn't wait for problems—it creates them, then sells you solutions that cause more problems, which require more solutions.
What follows is an examination of these interventions, one by one, showing how each serves the system rather than mothers and babies. The medical establishment has plenty of resources to tell their side. This is for women who sense something is wrong but are told they're being difficult, for parents who want to protect their babies but don't know where the dangers actually lie.
The predation never stops. From pregnancy tests to sleep training, from that first ultrasound to the last vaccine, the system feeds on fear, manufactures crisis, and profits from the damage it causes.
Your body isn't broken. Your baby doesn't need fixing. The system does.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Part I: The Setup - How They Get You in the Door
Ultrasounds: The Pictures That Cost More Than You Think
Due Dates: The 40-Week Lie
Flu Vaccines in Pregnancy: The Shot With Mercury Inside
RhoGAM: Injecting the Disease to Prevent the Disease
Part II: Manufacturing Labor - Creating the Crisis
Membrane Sweeps: "Just a Little Sweep" - The Lie We Tell at 39 Weeks
"Big Baby" Inductions: The Size Lie at 38 Weeks
Pitocin: The Synthetic Shortcut That Breaks Everything
Part III: The Cascade of Control
Electronic Fetal Monitoring: Before You Even Push
Lithotomy Position: How a King's Fetish Ruined Birth
Epidurals: The Numbness That Leads to Everything Else
Cesarean Sections: The Cut That Keeps Getting Deeper
VBAC Denial: Once a Cesarean, Always a Cesarean?
Part IV: The Theft Begins - What They Take at Birth
Immediate Cord Clamping: The Blood They Steal
Vitamin K Shot: The First Needle They Push
Vaccines: The Sacred Cow We're Not Allowed to Question
Silver Nitrate Eye Treatment: Burning Baby's Eyes
Circumcision: The First Betrayal
Part V: Undermining the Bond
Breastmilk vs Formula: The Living Food They Want You to Replace
Pacifiers: The Plastic Substitute for What They Really Need
Co-Sleeping vs Cribs: Where Babies Actually Want to Sleep
21. Controlled Crying: Teaching Babies That Nobody's Coming
Part VI: The Alternative - Reclaiming Birth
Homebirth vs Hospital: Where Birth Still Makes Sense
Conclusion: Your Body Isn't Broken, The System Is
Part I: The Setup - How They Get You in the Door
1. Ultrasounds: The Pictures That Cost More Than You Think
Every pregnancy comes with them now—those grainy black and white images for the fridge. The profile shot at 20 weeks. Maybe a 3D image where your baby looks vaguely like an alien made of caramel. We've normalized recreational ultrasounds so completely that boutique scanning centers sit in strip malls next to nail salons. "Meet Your Baby Today!" the signs promise. What they don't mention is what those sound waves might be doing while they're creating your keepsake.
Here's what nobody tells you about ultrasound: it's not just taking pictures. It's sending high-frequency sound waves into your womb, where they bounce off your baby, creating heat and pressure changes in those tiny developing tissues. The FDA actually warns against keepsake ultrasounds, but who reads FDA warnings when there's a chance to see baby yawning?
The heat is what gets me. Ultrasound can raise tissue temperature by several degrees. Your baby's brain, developing at breakneck speed, laying down neural pathways that will last a lifetime, getting warmed like leftovers. Studies have found that prenatal ultrasound exposure correlates with increased left-handedness—seems harmless until you realize that indicates brain changes. Other research links it to speech delays, lower birth weight, increased autism risk. But mention this at your prenatal appointment and watch how fast you're labeled "difficult."
They'll tell you ultrasounds have been used for decades, they're perfectly safe. You know what else we said was perfectly safe? X-rays in pregnancy. Thalidomide. DES. We have a spectacular track record of discovering harm only after we've exposed millions of babies to something. Ultrasound's effects might be subtler, showing up as slightly lower test scores, a bit more hyperactivity, just enough change to fly under the radar while still reshaping a generation.
The routine 20-week anatomy scan—fine, I get it. Checking for serious abnormalities that might need intervention. But the dating scan, the position check, the growth scan, the "let's just take a peek" scan? We're averaging 5-7 ultrasounds per pregnancy now. Some high-risk pregnancies get weekly scans. That's hours of exposure during the most vulnerable period of human development.
And for what? Ultrasound dating is often less accurate than simply asking when your last period was. Those growth measurements that terrify women about "big babies"? Wrong up to 20% of the time. Position checks at 36 weeks, when babies are still flipping around? Pointless. We're bathing babies in sound waves to gather information that's often wrong or irrelevant.
A few midwifes only uses a fetoscope—that old-fashioned trumpet-looking thing. No electricity, no waves, just amplified sound. They can catch every issue that matters, missed nothing that needed intervention. The babies aren't missing anything by not having their photos taken in utero. But try explaining that to the grandparents wanting their first grandchild's portrait at 12 weeks.
The research coming out now is not good. Mouse studies show ultrasound scrambles brain cell migration. Human studies find behavioral changes that last into childhood. The more we look, the more we find. But the ultrasound industry is worth billions, and those 3D scanning boutiques aren't closing anytime soon.
Your baby's development is a mystery that doesn't need documenting every few weeks. For millions of years, babies grew in the dark, undisturbed, their first appearance a genuine revelation. Maybe there was wisdom in that darkness. Maybe some things aren't meant to be seen until they're ready.
That grainy picture on your fridge? It might have cost more than you know.
Silent Waves, Lasting Impact - Lies are Unbekoming
Ultrasound - Lies are Unbekoming
2. Due Dates: The 40-Week Lie
Your due date is fiction. A guess based on the assumption that every woman has a 28-day cycle, ovulates on day 14, and gestates for exactly 280 days. As if bodies were factories with standardized production timelines. They took the average length of pregnancy—itself a messy calculation—and decided to treat it like a deadline. Now here you are at 39 weeks and 6 days, and everyone's asking: "Still pregnant?"
Four percent. That's how many babies actually arrive on their "due date." You have better odds of rolling snake eyes. Yet that arbitrary date becomes the center of everything—your plans, your anxiety, your doctor's increasingly urgent tone as you approach and then pass it. "Overdue," they'll say, like you're a library book accumulating fines.
Here's what that date does to your brain: it creates a countdown. Every day past it feels like failure. Your mother-in-law texts daily. You start googling "risks of going past due date" at 3 AM, finding horror stories written by lawyers. The stress hormones flooding your system—cortisol, adrenaline—are literally working against the hormones you need for labor. Your body, sensing danger, holds on tighter. The very anxiety about being "late" might be what's keeping you pregnant.
I know a woman who was told at 40 weeks and 3 days that her placenta was "aging." Like produce going bad. They scheduled an induction for the next morning. She went into labor that night—her body's last-ditch effort to avoid the cascade of interventions awaiting her.
The studies on this are maddening. The big scary increase in stillbirth risk after 42 weeks? We're talking about going from 2 in 1,000 to 4 in 1,000. Doubled risk sounds terrifying. Two extra babies per thousand sounds like what it is—still incredibly rare. And those studies don't account for the risks added by the interventions used to prevent that small increase. Induction increases your chances of cesarean, of hemorrhage, of your baby needing NICU time. But those risks don't get the same breathless coverage.
At 41 weeks, the pressure becomes relentless. "We really should schedule an induction." "Your baby is getting too big." That last one's particularly rich—ultrasound estimates of fetal weight are notoriously inaccurate, sometimes off by pounds. But it plants the seed: your body is growing a baby it can't birth.
The language matters. "Overdue" implies dysfunction. Some midwives just say "41 weeks pregnant," because that's what you are. Not overdue. Just still pregnant.
Other cultures talk about birth happening "when the fruit is ripe." The baby as an active participant with their own timeline, not a package that needs delivering. When you truly wait—lower intervention rates, better outcomes. Babies who come when they're ready breathe better, nurse better, regulate their temperature better. Almost like they know something we don't.
One woman lied about her last menstrual period with her second pregnancy. Added a week. She birthed at what they thought was 41 weeks but was actually 42. Everyone healthy. Just a baby who needed six more days than average.
The cruelest part? Oxytocin—the hormone that starts labor—is shy. It likes darkness, privacy, safety. It doesn't like countdown clocks and doctors shaking their heads about your "unfavorable cervix."
What if we called it an "estimated birth month" instead? Sometime between 38 and 42 weeks, your baby will likely arrive. Trust your body. Imagine the different energy of those final weeks. Anticipation instead of anxiety.
Your body didn't forget how to birth. That date in your chart is just someone's best guess from 1830. The date is a lie. Your body is telling the truth.
3. Flu Vaccines in Pregnancy: The Shot With Mercury Inside
"You really should get your flu shot." It comes up at every prenatal appointment now, sandwiched between weight checks and blood pressure readings. They make it sound simple, routine, like taking a prenatal vitamin. What they don't mention—what they almost never mention—is that multi-dose vials of flu vaccine contain thimerosal. That's mercury. The same mercury we're told to avoid in tuna, the same mercury being phased out of thermometers, the same mercury that's a known neurotoxin. But somehow, injecting it directly into pregnant women became standard care.
Let me be clear about what thimerosal is: it's about 50% mercury by weight. When it enters your body, it breaks down into ethylmercury. The CDC will tell you ethylmercury clears from the body faster than methylmercury (the kind in fish), as if "faster" means "harmless." But it still crosses the placenta. It still reaches your baby's developing brain. And that brain—God, that brain is doing things at a cellular level we're only beginning to understand. Neural pathways forming, synapses connecting, the architecture of consciousness being laid down. And we're sending mercury into that construction zone.
The studies they cite to prove safety? Look closer. Many were epidemiological—population studies that miss subtle effects. The ones that actually measured what happens when you inject pregnant women with thimerosal? Harder to find. Meanwhile, research keeps surfacing that makes everyone uncomfortable: correlations with tics, language delays, attention issues. Not huge effects—not obvious, immediate damage—but the kind of subtle shifts that might only show up when a kid struggles in school years later.
Here's what kills me: single-dose flu vaccines without thimerosal exist, not that I think you should have them either. They're right there, no mercury. But they cost more. Multi-dose vials are cheaper, easier to store, more profitable. So most pregnant women get the mercury version, often without being told there's even a choice. The consent form, if you get one, might mention "preservatives" in tiny print. How many women would choose differently if someone actually said the word "mercury"?
They push especially hard if you're pregnant during flu season. "You're immune-compromised," they say. "Flu is dangerous in pregnancy." And yes, severe flu can be serious. But they don't mention that the flu shot's “effectiveness” varies wildly year to year—sometimes as low as 10%. They don't discuss natural ways to support immunity. They definitely don't mention that many countries don't routinely vaccinate pregnant women at all, without seeing disasters.
I've watched women agonize over whether to eat a piece of sushi, terrified of trace mercury, while rolling up their sleeves for vaccines containing 25 micrograms of the stuff. The cognitive dissonance is staggering. We've been so well-trained to comply, to be "good patients," that we inject known neurotoxins while avoiding soft cheese.
A midwife told me she's seen the shift over her forty-year career. Flu shots went from "absolutely not during pregnancy" to "maybe if high-risk" to "everyone must have one" in just two decades. Not because of some breakthrough in safety data. Because of policy, profit, and the slow normalization of intervening in pregnancy at every opportunity.
Your baby's brain is building itself from nothing. Every chemical that crosses the placenta becomes part of that construction. Maybe—just maybe—mercury shouldn't be one of them. The precautionary principle used to mean something in medicine. Now it seems the only precaution is against questioning what they put in the needle.
4. RhoGAM: The Cover Story for Vitamin K Injury
In 1961, American hospitals began routinely injecting every newborn with synthetic vitamin K. Within years, doctors noticed a surge in newborn jaundice cases, some severe enough to cause brain damage. The timing was unmistakable—jaundice rates climbed right after vitamin K became universal. But rather than investigate whether their new intervention was causing harm, the medical establishment found the perfect scapegoat: Rh-negative mothers. By 1968, they introduced RhoGAM, marketed as preventing "hemolytic disease of the newborn," effectively blaming 15% of mothers for problems that mysteriously emerged after vitamin K became mandatory.
The timeline tells the story. For decades before synthetic vitamin K, severe newborn jaundice was relatively rare. Then vitamin K injections become universal—a 20,000-times overdose that newborn livers must process. Jaundice cases spike. Brain damage from kernicterus increases. The vitamin K manufacturers face a crisis: their profitable intervention is causing obvious harm. They need something else to blame.
Enter RhoGAM in 1968. Suddenly, all those jaundice cases have an explanation unrelated to vitamin K. "Your baby's jaundice? That's from Rh incompatibility." The vitamin K shot that actually caused the crisis becomes invisible. When babies react badly to that massive overdose—severe jaundice, seizures, organ failure—doctors point to the mother's blood type. Parents accept it because they've been primed to expect problems from being Rh-negative.
The genius is the comprehensiveness. RhoGAM “antibodies” do cause mild hemolysis when crossing the placenta—just enough to provide plausible deniability for vitamin K injuries. A baby with catastrophic vitamin K reaction gets labeled as "severe Rh sensitization." Death certificates never mention vitamin K. The system is protected.
They expanded RhoGAM to prenatal use not for medical evidence—the Cochrane Review calls it "low quality" and "not conclusive"—but for better cover. Now they're injecting antibodies during pregnancy that attack fetal blood cells, creating baseline hemolysis that masks vitamin K damage at birth. When that newborn develops severe jaundice after the vitamin K shot, everyone expects it. "We knew this might happen because of the RhoGAM."
The 40% of Rh-negative women carrying Rh-negative babies who get RhoGAM anyway aren't receiving unnecessary treatment—they're maintaining the cover story. If only at-risk babies showed vitamin K injuries, the pattern would be obvious. Treating everyone creates statistical noise to hide the signal.
Parents who've lost babies tell similar stories. Perfect pregnancy, routine RhoGAM at 28 weeks. Healthy birth, vitamin K injection. Within hours: lethargy, jaundice. Within days: phototherapy fails, seizures. Some babies don't survive. Deaths get attributed to "Rh complications" even when the baby never bled. The vitamin K overdose that killed their child is never investigated.
Some midwives have cracked the code. They notice babies whose mothers had RhoGAM are more likely to crash after vitamin K shots. Using oral vitamin K or delaying injection, suddenly those "high-risk Rh babies" stop having crises. The connection is obvious to anyone looking.
The research that would expose this will never be funded. No one will compare vitamin K reactions in RhoGAM versus non-RhoGAM babies. No one will investigate whether countries with lower vitamin K doses have fewer "Rh complications."
The system created the perfect crime. Inject newborns with an overdose causing jaundice and brain damage. Blame the mother's blood type—something that makes her feel genetically responsible. Create just enough real hemolysis with RhoGAM to make the cover believable. When babies suffer vitamin K injury, mothers accept it was inevitable.
Your Rh-negative blood isn't causing your baby's jaundice. The shot they gave at birth is. RhoGAM isn't preventing disease—it's providing alibis for vitamin K damage.
The RhoGAM Question: What Every Rh-Negative Mother Should Know Before Saying Yes
Part II: Manufacturing Labor - Creating the Crisis
5. Membrane Sweeps: "Just a Little Sweep" - The Lie We Tell at 39 Weeks
Your doctor suggests it casually at your appointment, maybe while you're still sitting up, fully clothed. "We could do a membrane sweep today, help things along." They might call it "gentle encouragement" or say it'll "ripen your cervix"—language soft enough to make you think it's no big deal. Some women don't even realize it's happening until those fingers are already inside them, separating membranes from cervical walls with a circular, stretching motion that feels nothing like the word "sweep" suggests.
Here's what they're actually doing: forcing their fingers through your cervix—which might still be mostly closed—and running them between the amniotic sac and your uterine wall. Imagine someone reaching into your mouth and separating your gums from your teeth. That's the level of intimate disruption we're talking about.
The immediate aftermath? You might bleed. You'll probably cramp. Those cramps might feel like contractions, get your hopes up, send you pacing the living room at 2 AM thinking this is it—except it's not. It's just your irritated uterus responding to being manually disturbed. Your body wasn't ready. The complex cascade of hormones that triggers real labor doesn't respond well to forced entry.
I've heard women describe their sweep differently depending on who's in the room. To their partners: "It was uncomfortable but fine." To other mothers, later, quietly: "I felt violated." That gap between public face and private truth tells you everything.
The research is remarkably unimpressive. Boulvain's 2020 review found that membrane sweeping doesn't meaningfully reduce the need for medical induction. Doesn't shorten labor. Doesn't improve outcomes. What it does do is make you three times more likely to have irregular contractions that go nowhere. It disrupts your cervical mucus plug—that barrier your body carefully maintained for nine months. Some women end up with infections. Others just end up exhausted from days of false labor, depleted before the real work even begins.
But here's what gets me: the way this procedure plants doubt. You were fine, maybe even confident, until someone stuck their fingers in you and declared you needed help. Now you're wondering if your body knows what it's doing. That seed of uncertainty—maybe I can't do this on my own—grows. By the time real labor starts, if it starts, you've already internalized the message that your body needs managing.
The timing is never coincidental. Thirty-nine weeks, forty weeks—right when anxiety peaks, when everyone's asking if the baby's here yet. You're vulnerable. The sweep feels like doing something, taking action, better than just waiting. Nobody mentions that waiting might be exactly what your body needs.
There's this woman I know who declined the sweep three times. Her doctor's frustration was palpable by the third refusal. "Don't you want to meet your baby?" As if her body, left alone, would just forget to go into labor. She went into labor naturally at 41 weeks, birthed beautifully. But she told me later how much energy it took to keep saying no, how guilty they made her feel for trusting her own body's timeline.
And the pain—women who've handled transition without flinching describe sweeps as surprisingly brutal. It's a different kind of pain—sharp, invasive, wrong. Your cervix wasn't meant to be manually stretched like this.
The real tragedy is how unnecessary it usually is. Most women will go into labor by 41 weeks without any intervention at all. Other countries with better maternal outcomes don't sweep routinely. They don't even mention it unless there's a medical indication.
The stretch and sweep isn't gentle encouragement. It's forced entry. It's someone else's timeline imposed on your body. And every woman deserves to know that before those gloves go on.
6. "Big Baby" Inductions: The Size Lie at 38 Weeks
"Your baby is measuring big." There it is, dropped into your appointment like a bomb. Suddenly, your healthy pregnancy becomes high-risk. Your body, which has grown this baby perfectly for nine months, is now suspected of fundamental incompetence. They throw around terms like "macrosomia" and "shoulder dystocia," schedule extra ultrasounds, start talking induction. All because of measurements that are wrong up to 20% of the time. That "nine-pound baby" they're panicking about? Could easily be seven pounds. But once the fear is planted, good luck pulling that weed.
The ultrasound tech squints at the screen, measuring femur length, head circumference, typing numbers into formulas designed in the 1980s. "Looks like we've got a big one!" As if your pelvis is a fixed ring of bone instead of an engineered marvel that actually moves, expands, shapeshifts during birth. They never mention that. They never mention that women have been birthing ten-pound babies for millennia. Your grandmother probably did it. In her bedroom. Without anyone measuring anything.
Here's what they don't tell you about those scary ultrasound estimates: they're basically educated guesses. The margin of error is so wide you could drive a truck through it. But that number—that guess—becomes gospel. It goes in your chart. Every subsequent provider sees it, raises their eyebrows, starts the fear cascade all over again. "I see baby was measuring large at 36 weeks..." And just like that, you're on the pathway to intervention.
Here is a very common story. Woman gets told her baby is "too big." Gets induced at 39 weeks. Induction doesn't work well because her body wasn't ready. Pitocin, epidural, hours of pushing against a cervix that never fully dilated. Emergency cesarean for "failure to progress" and "suspected macrosomia." Baby comes out: seven pounds, six ounces. Everyone acts like they saved the day. Nobody mentions that the entire emergency was manufactured.
The research on this is infuriating. Studies show that suspected big babies have higher cesarean rates than actual big babies nobody knew were big. Think about that. It's not the size that causes problems—it's the fear of the size. The belief creates the outcome. When providers think a baby is large, they intervene more, they're quicker to call failure to progress, they see complications where they might otherwise see variations. The diagnosis itself becomes the disease.
And positioning—God, why does nobody talk about positioning? Your pelvis can expand by up to 30% in certain positions. Squatting, hands and knees, side-lying with your leg supported. But if you're induced, epiduraled, stuck on your back with your pelvis compressed against the bed, of course that baby seems too big. You've literally made the space smaller. Then they blame your baby's size instead of their management.
Other countries don't do this. In places where midwifery is standard, where women birth upright, where patience is valued over protocols, "big babies" come out just fine. The Netherlands, where home birth is common, doesn't see an epidemic of stuck babies despite having some of the tallest people in the world.
Women who birth ten-pound babies at home often report their midwives never mentioned size, just kept repeating, "Your body grew this baby, your body can birth this baby." No fear, no rush, no arbitrary deadlines. These babies emerge in water, on birth stools, in squatting positions—positions that maximize pelvic opening. Meanwhile, the same size babies in hospitals trigger panic, interventions, cesareans. The difference isn't the babies. It's the approach.
Stop letting them measure your baby's worth in pounds and fear. Your body isn't stupid. It didn't accidentally grow a baby it can't birth. That's not how evolution works. That's not how any of this works.
7. Pitocin: The Synthetic Shortcut That Breaks Everything
Your body makes oxytocin—the love hormone, the bonding hormone, the one that opens your cervix in waves so perfect that scientists still can't fully replicate it. But hospitals don't have time for your body's wisdom. Enter Pitocin: synthetic oxytocin that works like using a sledgehammer when you needed a key. They hook you to an IV, dial up the drip, and force your uterus into submission. "We need to get things moving," they say, as if your body forgot how to birth after doing it successfully for three hundred thousand years.
The contractions Pitocin creates aren't like natural ones. Natural contractions build gradually, peak, release—with breaks between for you and baby to recover, to oxygenate. Pitocin contractions slam into you like a freight train, one after another, relentless. No building, no breaks, just brutal intensity that has women begging for epidurals who might have managed without them. Your body doesn't recognize these contractions as its own. Because they're not.
And your baby? They're getting squeezed harder and longer than nature intended. Their heart rate starts dropping—of course it does, they can barely catch their breath between contractions. Now you've got "fetal distress," which sounds terrifying because it is. The solution to this manufactured emergency? Often a cesarean. Congratulations, Pitocin just bought you major surgery.
The real crime is how casually they use it. "You're not progressing fast enough." Fast enough for whom? The hospital needs that bed. The doctor has dinner plans. Your labor doesn't fit their timeline, so they hijack it. Studies show first-time mothers can labor safely for 20+ hours, but hospitals start pushing Pitocin at hour six. They've turned birth into a race nobody asked to run.
Here's what they don't tell you: Pitocin doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier like natural oxytocin does. So while your uterus is contracting, your brain isn't getting the signals it needs. The euphoria, the endorphins, the natural pain relief your body produces—none of that happens properly. You get all the pain with none of the purpose. The hormonal symphony that should flood you with love and bonding gets replaced by synthetic noise.
They threaten you with it too. "Your baby's too big." "You're overdue." "Your water's been broken too long." Fear, fear, fear, until Pitocin seems like rescue instead of assault. They create the panic, then offer the solution. Classic manipulation, except the stakes are your body, your baby, your birth experience.
Women describe Pitocin labors differently than natural ones. Natural labor, even when intense, has rhythm, purpose, progress you can feel. Pitocin labor is violence—external, imposed, wrong. Your body fights it even as it succumbs to it. Some women say it feels like being tortured by your own uterus. That's not birth; that's violation.
And after? When natural oxytocin floods you post-birth, it helps you forget the pain, helps you bond, helps your milk let down. Pitocin? Once they turn off that drip, you're empty. No natural high, no hormone rush, just exhaustion and sometimes a baby you feel strangely disconnected from. They broke your body's system and wonder why you're struggling.
The cascade is predictable: Pitocin leads to epidural (because the pain is unbearable), epidural leads to more Pitocin (because it slows labor), which leads to fetal distress, which leads to cesarean. They could write the script beforehand. Maybe they do.
Your body knows how to birth. It doesn't need synthetic improvement. It needs time, support, and faith in the process evolution perfected. Pitocin isn't help—it's hijacking.
Before the First Breath: How Modern Obstetrics Preys on Mothers and Babies
Natural Birth in a Medical World: A Deep Dive into Modern Childbirth
Part III: The Cascade of Control
8. Electronic Fetal Monitoring: Before You Even Push
You walk into a hospital to give birth, and before you know it, you're hooked up to machines. The beeping starts. Someone's fingers are inside you, checking your cervix—did they even ask? Maybe they did, but the way they phrased it made it sound routine, necessary, like refusing would mark you as difficult. This is how it begins: not with support, but with surveillance.
The electronic fetal monitor straps you to the bed. Every fluctuation on that screen becomes a potential crisis. The nurses glance at it more than they look at you. And here's the thing about those monitors—they don't actually improve outcomes for most low-risk births. Multiple studies have shown this. But they do something else remarkably well: they keep you still, keep you worried, keep you watching those jagged lines like they're tea leaves revealing your baby's fate.
Your body knows what stress does to labor. When you're afraid, when you feel watched and judged, your brain floods with cortisol and adrenaline—ancient chemicals designed to help you flee from tigers, not birth babies. These hormones are oxytocin's sworn enemies. Oxytocin opens, softens, moves things along. Fear slams everything shut. Lederman documented this in '78, Wadhwa confirmed it in 2011, but honestly, birthing women have known it forever. Animals seek dark, quiet corners to labor. We strap women to beds under fluorescent lights and wonder why labor stalls.
Then comes Pitocin, synthetic oxytocin, because your "inadequate" body isn't progressing fast enough. Never mind that the stress they created caused the stall. The Pitocin makes contractions harder, more painful. Now you need an epidural. The epidural might slow things down again. Maybe the baby's heart rate dips—could be positional, probably temporary, but those monitors are screaming and suddenly everyone's talking about cesareans. Each intervention begets the next, a cascade that started with that first moment of making you feel like your body was a problem to be solved.
Women are transformed by this system. They walk in powerful, curious, ready. They leave smaller somehow. When you spend your labor being told, explicitly or implicitly, that your body is failing, that belief doesn't just evaporate when the baby arrives. It seeps into those first attempts at breastfeeding—my body couldn't birth properly, why would it nourish properly? Some women describe their births years later with the same hollow look trauma survivors get. Not because birth itself traumatized them, but because the system did.
And yes, let's say the quiet part loud: this is profitable. Every intervention has a price tag. The EFM that doesn't improve outcomes but does increase cesarean rates? That's not a bug in the system; it's a feature. Cesareans are quick, schedulable, expensive. A woman laboring peacefully in a tub for twelve hours—where's the money in that?
But it goes deeper than profit. There's something about the female body in its power that our medical system seems unable to tolerate. Birth is one of the few moments when women's bodies do something utterly profound, something that requires no improvement, no management—just support and patience. Most of the time. The system's response? To problematize it, pathologize it, turn it into a series of risks requiring professional mitigation.
What would change look like? Real change means flipping the fundamental assumption: instead of treating birth as a disaster waiting to happen, what if we treated it as a normal physiological process that occasionally needs help? What if the default was trust instead of suspicion?
The real question isn't whether we can afford to change this system. It's whether we can afford not to.
Terrorised Women - Lies are Unbekoming
Before the First Breath: How Modern Obstetrics Preys on Mothers and Babies
9. Lithotomy Position: How a King's Fetish Ruined Birth
You're pushing a baby out, working with gravity, your pelvis opened to its maximum capacity—this is how humans birthed for hundreds of thousands of years. Then some French king with a birth fetish changed everything, and now we're all on our backs, pushing uphill, because Louis XIV wanted a better view of his mistresses giving birth. I'm not making this up.
Before King Louis and his voyeuristic tendencies, women squatted, knelt, stood, leaned. They moved how their bodies told them to move. The pelvis can open 30% wider when you squat. Thirty percent. That's the difference between your baby sliding out or getting stuck. But Louis wanted to watch—really watch—so his mistresses had to lie flat, legs spread, the whole show visible for his royal entertainment. And somehow, somehow, this became medical practice.
Think about the physics for a second. When you're upright, gravity pulls your baby down and out. When you're on your back, you're literally pushing against gravity, shoving your baby uphill. Your tailbone is pressed against the bed, can't move out of the way like it's designed to. Your pelvis is compressed. The major blood vessels running along your spine get squashed by your uterus, reducing blood flow to your baby. It's possibly the worst position imaginable for birth, which is probably why no other mammal does it.
But there you are in the hospital, feet in stirrups, working ten times harder than necessary because some dead French pervert's preferences got coded into medical training.
The damage this position causes is staggering. More tearing because your perineum can't stretch properly. More episiotomies because the baby seems "stuck" (they're not stuck, you're just in the wrong position). More fetal distress because of the compressed blood vessels. More exhaustion because you're fighting gravity. More interventions because when birth doesn't progress in this unnatural position, they blame your body instead of their protocol.
Women instinctively try to turn, to get on all fours, to squat, only to be told, "No, no, we need you on your back so we can monitor." Monitor what? Your failure to progress in a position that ensures you won't progress? The nurses literally fight women's instincts, forcing them back into submission, back into the position that makes everything harder.
In cultures where medicalized birth hasn't taken over, women still squat. They hold onto ropes, lean against walls, let their bodies open. Their labors are shorter, less painful, require fewer interventions. But suggest squatting in a hospital and watch the panic. "We can't monitor properly." "The doctor needs access." "It's not safe." Not safe? Lying on your back with your legs in the air is safe, but squatting—the position humans used for millennia—is dangerous?
Here's what they won't tell you: doctors prefer you on your back because it's convenient for them. They can see better, reach easier, stay seated on their little rolling stools. Your comfort, your instincts, your pelvic mechanics—all sacrificed for their convenience. The king's fetish became the doctor's comfort, and your body pays the price.
Some progressive hospitals have squat bars now, birthing stools, tubs. Acting like they invented something revolutionary when really they're just letting women do what their bodies always knew how to do. Before a king's kink became medical gospel. Before birth became a spectator sport where the comfort of the audience matters more than the performer.
Your body knows how to birth. It knows to squat, to move, to open. That knowledge is older than kingdoms, older than medicine, older than the lie that you need to perform birth flat on your back for someone else's view.
10. Epidurals: The Numbness That Leads to Everything Else
They offer it like salvation. "You don't have to suffer," they say, as if labor pain were pathology instead of purpose. The anesthesiologist arrives like a hero, needle in hand, ready to rescue you from your body's audacity to feel birth. And just like that, you go from active participant to passenger in your own labor. Your legs become someone else's. Your contractions, once waves you were riding, become lines on a monitor someone else interprets.
Here's what they don't mention when they're selling you that relief: epidurals slow labor. Almost always. Your contractions weaken because you can't feel them, because your body's feedback loop is broken. So now you need Pitocin to speed things back up. But Pitocin contractions are brutal, unnatural, harder on your baby. Good thing you can't feel them, right? Except your baby can. Their heart rate starts dipping. Now we're talking fetal distress. Maybe you need vacuum extraction. Maybe forceps. Maybe that cesarean they've been hinting at.
Each intervention begets the next. It's called the cascade of interventions, and epidurals are often the first domino. You came in planning a natural birth, but once that needle goes in your spine, "natural" exits the building. You're on your back now—the worst position for birth but the only one that works when you can't feel your legs. Your pelvis can't open properly. You can't work with gravity. When it's time to push, you're guessing, hoping, while someone counts to ten and tells you to hold your breath like you're at the gym.
The risks they gloss over are substantial. Your blood pressure can tank. You might spike a fever that has nothing to do with infection but makes them treat your baby like they're infected anyway—antibiotics, NICU observation, separation. Some women get spinal headaches that last weeks. Nerve damage, though rare, happens. And that "rare" becomes your reality when you're the one who can't walk properly six months later.
For the baby? Those drugs cross the placenta. Your baby is drugged too, just less efficiently. They're born groggier, have more trouble latching, lose more weight. Some studies link epidural use to ASD (although we know that is mostly vaccines), ADHD, learning disabilities. "Correlation isn't causation," they say, while refusing to study it properly. Funny how that works.
But the real tragedy is what epidurals steal from you: the experience of birthing your baby. Not just enduring it, but actively participating in it. The fetal ejection reflex—that overwhelming, involuntary urge to push that birth triggers—doesn't happen when you're numb. The hormonal cascade that bonds you to your baby, that floods you with endorphins and oxytocin, gets interrupted. You might feel relief, but you won't feel triumph. You were there, but you weren't present.
Over 70% of women in some hospitals get epidurals. Not because 70% of women can't handle birth, but because the system is designed to make you believe you can't. They restrict your movement, deny you food, surround you with fear and machines, then act like heroes when they numb you to the misery they created. It's like breaking someone's leg and then taking credit for providing crutches.
Pain in labor isn't meaningless suffering—it's communication. It tells you to move, to change positions, to work with your body. It triggers hormones that help your baby transition to life outside. It's intense, yes, but it's also temporary, purposeful, survivable. Women did it for millennia without anesthesiologists on standby.
The epidural isn't just pain relief. It's submission to a system that doesn't trust your body's wisdom, that prefers you numb and manageable to present and powerful.
Natural Birth in a Medical World: A Deep Dive into Modern Childbirth
11. Cesarean Sections: The Cut That Keeps Getting Deeper
One in three women will birth through surgery now. Line up three pregnant women, and statistics say one will end up on an operating table, her belly opened in layers—skin, fat, fascia, muscle, peritoneum, uterus—like some terrible blooming flower. We've normalized this so completely that people schedule them like hair appointments. "My C-section is on Tuesday." As if major abdominal surgery were just another way to have a baby.
The official reasons sound reasonable enough. Breech baby. Placenta previa. True emergencies where surgery saves lives—thank god we have it. But dig into those charts and you'll find other reasons: "Failure to progress" (translation: labor taking longer than the hospital likes). "Big baby" (based on ultrasounds wrong up to 20% of the time). And my personal favorite: "Provider preference," which at least has the honesty to admit someone wanted to get home for dinner.
Hospitals make more money from surgical births. It's that simple and that ugly. Doctors face less liability cutting than waiting. You can't be sued for the C-section you did, but you can be sued for the one you didn't do, even if waiting would have been fine. So they cut. Better safe than sued.
But safe for whom?
The recovery is brutal. You've just had major surgery, but here's a newborn who needs you every two hours. Try breastfeeding when you can't use your abdominal muscles. The infection risk, the blood clots, the adhesions that build up inside you like secret scar tissue. Next pregnancy? Your risk of placenta accreta—where the placenta grows through the scar into your organs—goes up. Each pregnancy after becomes higher risk because of that first cut.
Women say they felt like failures. Their bodies couldn't do the "one thing they're designed to do." Never mind that their bodies were never given a real chance. Induced at 39 weeks for convenience, epidural at 4 centimeters, can't feel to push effectively, baby's heart rate dips from the Pitocin, and suddenly it's an emergency. The system created the emergency, then heroically solved it with surgery.
The baby pays a price too. That squeeze through the birth canal isn't just dramatic—it's functional. It squeezes fluid from their lungs, triggers stress hormones that help them breathe, coats them in your bacteria that becomes their first immune system. C-section babies miss all of that. They're extracted into sterility, often struggling to breathe.
Vaginal birth gives babies their mother's bacteria—the good stuff that trains their immune system. C-section babies get hospital bacteria instead. The difference shows up years later: higher rates of asthma, allergies, obesity. We turned birth into a sterile extraction and wonder why kids have so many immune problems now.
There's this moment during a cesarean nobody talks about. You're lying there, numb from the chest down, and you can feel the tugging. Not pain, but movement. Your body being rearranged. That disconnect—feeling your body being handled while you lie immobilized—it stays with you.
In places where midwifery is the default, where birth is treated as normal until proven otherwise, cesarean rates stay far lower. Mendelsohn noted that in the 1960s, anyone with a cesarean rate above 10% was considered a pariah. Denniston states the maximum should be 6%—the rate Michel Odent achieved at Pithiviers Hospital in France. We're at 32% and climbing.
The scar fades, but the questions remain: Was it necessary? What if they'd waited? These questions deserve better answers than the ones we're giving.
Cesarean (C-section) - Lies are Unbekoming
12. VBAC Denial: Once a Cesarean, Always a Cesarean?
"Once a cesarean, always a cesarean." Doctors still say this. In 2025. As if your uterus is made of tissue paper, ready to explode if you dare try to birth vaginally after surgery. They'll throw around the term "uterine rupture" like it's common, inevitable, a ticking time bomb in your belly. Let me tell you what they don't mention: the actual risk is less than 1%. You have a higher chance of having a cord prolapse, placental abruption, or a dozen other complications they never breathlessly warn you about. But those don't have the same theatrical quality as "rupture," do they?
Here's what really happens when you ask about VBAC. The eye roll. The sigh. The "well, we don't really do those here." Or worse, the fear campaign: stories about catastrophic ruptures, dead babies, hysterectomies. They won't tell you that most "ruptures" are actually dehiscences—the scar stretching or partially opening without emergency, often discovered incidentally during a successful VBAC. They definitely won't mention that repeat cesareans get progressively more dangerous. That third, fourth cesarean? Now we're talking real risk—hemorrhage, placenta accreta, organs fused together with scar tissue. But sure, let's worry about that less-than-1% rupture risk instead.
Dr. Stuart Fischbein, one of the few OBs who actually supports VBAC, calls this what it is: malpractice. Not medical malpractice—practice malpractice. The skills to attend VBAC have atrophied. Easier to cut again than to sit with a laboring woman, watching, waiting, trusting. Hospitals write policies that make VBAC technically available but practically impossible. "Sure, you can try, but only if you're in active labor by 39 weeks, with a favorable cervix, and the anesthesiologist has to be in the building, and we need continuous monitoring, and no water birth, and..." The restrictions pile up until attempting VBAC becomes harder than just scheduling the repeat surgery.
I’m aware of women who've driven three hours in labor to find a VBAC-supportive provider. Women who've hired multiple doulas, creating a fortress of support around themselves. Women who've lied about their previous cesarean to get care. The fact that they have to fight this hard for something that should be their right—to at least try—tells you everything about how broken this is.
The informed consent conversation is a joke. They'll spend twenty minutes on rupture risks but thirty seconds on the risks of repeat surgery. They won't mention that VBAC success rates are 60-80%. They won't talk about the faster recovery, the better bonding, the lower infection risk, the fact that your baby gets that squeeze through the birth canal that helps their lungs, their microbiome, their entire system. They definitely won't mention that in countries where VBAC is supported—really supported, not just tolerated—the success rates are even higher.
The emotional toll of being denied VBAC goes unacknowledged. Women describe a particular kind of grief—not just about the birth they didn't have, but about the birth they weren't allowed to try for. There's a difference between a necessary repeat cesarean and a coerced one. One leaves you grateful. The other leaves you angry.
But we know better or at least should. The evidence is clear. VBAC is safe for most women. The real danger isn't in trying—it's in not being allowed to try. It's in treating women's bodies like damaged goods, like one surgery has broken them forever.
Your scar is stronger than they tell you. Your body more capable than they believe. You deserve better than their fears dressed up as concern.
Interview with Dr. Stuart Fischbein - Lies are Unbekoming
Part IV: The Theft Begins - What They Take at Birth
13. Immediate Cord Clamping: The Blood They Steal
Your baby is born, still connected to you, the cord pulsing between you like a lifeline—because that's exactly what it is. Inside that cord, blood is flowing from the placenta to your baby. Their blood. Not extra blood, not optional blood, but the 30% of their total blood volume still making its way home. And what does the medical system do? Clamps it off immediately, like shutting off a garden hose mid-flow. Your baby loses up to 40% of their blood volume in that moment. Imagine starting life nearly half-empty.
This wasn't always the insanity. For most of human history, nobody was in a rush to cut the cord. You birthed the baby, held them, maybe birthed the placenta, and somewhere in there, when the cord turned white and stopped pulsing, someone severed it. Natural. Obvious. Then in the 1960s, doctors decided immediate clamping was "cleaner," more "efficient." They had places to be, other babies to deliver. Your baby's blood became collateral damage to their schedule.
Dr. David Hutchon calls it like it is: we're creating anemic babies. Ten percent of toddlers in the UK are iron deficient. You know what iron deficiency does to developing brains? Nothing good. Meanwhile, that blood sitting in the placenta—the blood we're throwing in the medical waste bin—is loaded with iron, stem cells, clotting factors. It's literally liquid gold, and we're treating it like garbage.
Here's what that stolen blood was supposed to do: flood your baby's lungs, helping them clear fluid and breathe. Boost their iron stores for the next six months. Provide stem cells that we're only beginning to understand the importance of. For premature babies, that blood reduces brain bleeds and gut death (necrotizing enterocolitis, if you want the nightmare term). But sure, let's clamp immediately because it's tidier.
The excuses they give are laughable. "We need to resuscitate the baby!" Actually, keeping the cord intact during resuscitation gives the baby oxygenated blood from the placenta—nature's life support. "It causes jaundice!" Minimal increase, easily managed, and far less serious than chronic anemia. "Mothers will hemorrhage!" The Cochrane review of 15 trials found zero difference in maternal blood loss. Zero.
You know what's really behind immediate clamping? Cord blood banking. That's right—they want to sell your baby's blood back to you. "Bank your baby's stem cells for future medical needs!" they advertise, while stealing those exact stem cells from your newborn who needs them right now. Jennifer Margulis nails it: this is the "baby business" at its most grotesque. Creating a problem, selling a solution, your baby pays the price.
Some hospitals are catching on, offering "delayed" clamping—a generous 60 seconds. As if one minute captures the three to five minutes it actually takes for transfusion to complete. Some cords pulse for twenty minutes. But they've got protocols, timelines, and that next patient waiting.
When mammals give birth in the wild, nothing touches that cord until it's done its job. The mother waits. The baby receives their full blood volume. It's so simple, so obvious, that it takes a medical degree to mess it up.
Even the World “Health” Organization now recommends waiting at least a minute—a pathetic compromise, but progress. Some midwives wait until the cord is white and empty, the way it's supposed to be. They call it "physiological," but really it's just not stealing from newborns.
Your baby's blood belongs in your baby. Not in a banking facility, not in medical waste, but circulating through their tiny body, doing what blood does: sustaining life. The fact that we need research to prove this shows how far we've drifted from basic sanity.
Delayed Cord Clamping - Lies are Unbekoming
14. Vitamin K Shot: The First Needle They Push
Your baby is minutes old, maybe hasn't even latched yet, and here comes the first needle. Vitamin K, they say, to prevent bleeding. They make it sound routine, essential, like denying it would be child abuse. What they don't mention is that the bleeding disorder they're preventing—VKDB—affects maybe 1 in 10,000 babies. But they'll inject all 10,000, just in case. And that injection isn't just vitamin K. It's synthetic vitamin K, preservatives, and aluminum, shot into a body that weighs seven pounds.
The fear campaign around this is masterful. They'll tell you about babies bleeding into their brains, catastrophic hemorrhages, death. What they won't tell you is that early VKDB is usually just minor bleeding—a bit from the umbilical cord, maybe a circumcision site (which you could avoid by not circumcising or being a girl!). Late VKDB, the scary brain-bleed kind, is incredibly rare and often associated with underlying liver problems. But they present it like every baby is a ticking time bomb without that shot.
Here's what's actually in that injection: phytonadione (synthetic K1), polysorbate 80 (which crosses the blood-brain barrier), propylene glycol (antifreeze ingredient), and sometimes benzyl alcohol. The dose? 20,000 times what your baby needs daily. Imagine taking 20,000 times your daily vitamin requirement in one shot. Your liver would scream. Now imagine a newborn liver, hours old, trying to process that flood.
Some babies react badly—really badly. Anaphylaxis, though rare, happens. Jaundice rates increase. There's this uncomfortable correlation between the rise in vitamin K injections and the rise in childhood cancers, particularly leukemia. Nobody wants to study it seriously because questioning vitamin K is medical heresy. But parents who've watched their healthy newborns react to that shot—sudden screaming, lethargy, feeding problems—they know something's not right.
The alternatives they don't want to discuss? Oral vitamin K. “Works” just as well when given properly, assuming it’s needed in the first place, no injection trauma, no massive overdose. Several European countries use oral protocols successfully. But oral doesn't make money like injections do. It requires multiple doses, parent compliance. The medical system doesn't trust parents to give their baby drops, but they'll send you home to care for a surgical circumcision wound.
Or how about this radical idea: delayed cord clamping. That blood they're so eager to clamp off? It's full of many things including vitamin K. If we stopped stealing babies' blood supply at birth, maybe they wouldn't need synthetic vitamin replacement. Add in breastfeeding—colostrum has vitamin K, and maternal diet affects levels. But no, let's inject everyone instead of addressing root causes.
The consent process is a joke. They present it as standard, necessary, everyone does it. If you question it, you're marked as difficult, negligent. Some hospitals threaten to call CPS if you refuse. For a vitamin. The same vitamin in your spinach. The coercion is breathtaking—sign here or we'll suggest you're an unfit parent.
What really bothers me is the timing. This baby just went through birth, needs comfort, warmth, your breast. Instead, they're getting stuck with needles, crying, stress hormones flooding their system right when they should be flooding with oxytocin and bonding chemicals. We've medicalized the first hour of life so thoroughly that babies can't even have sixty minutes without pharmaceutical intervention.
Your baby survived nine months of development without a vitamin K shot. Somehow humanity made it this far without injecting every newborn. Maybe, just maybe, there's wisdom in letting a body that knew how to build itself figure out how to maintain itself, with gentle support rather than aggressive intervention.
The very first injection - Vitamin K: "It’s just a vitamin"
Murphy’s stellar “Vitamin K” story - Lies are Unbekoming
Vaccinated (60%) vs Unvaccinated (2.64%)
The Unvaccinated: Proof of What We Lost
15. Vaccines: The Sacred Cow We're Not Allowed to Question
Before your baby is even a day old, before they've figured out how to latch, before you've counted all their toes—here comes the Hepatitis B vaccine. A disease spread through sex and dirty needles, and we're injecting newborns "just in case" their mother somehow has it despite prenatal testing. The aluminum in that shot hits a body that weighs seven pounds, a brain doing more development in these first hours than it ever will again. This is how we welcome babies to the world now: with a needle full of aluminum and formaldehyde for a disease they have virtually zero risk of contracting.
By two months, they're back for more—eight vaccines in one visit. DTaP, rotavirus, Hib, pneumococcal, polio. Their immune systems, barely formed, get hit with more toxins and foreign proteins than our ancestors encountered in a lifetime. And if you dare ask, "Is this safe? Is this necessary?" you're anti-science, a danger to society, probably planning to bring back the plague.
But here's what they don't want to discuss: the aluminum doesn't just disappear. It crosses the blood-brain barrier. It accumulates. Studies nobody wants to fund properly keep finding these uncomfortable correlations—vaccinated kids with higher rates of autism, ADHD, autoimmune disorders. "Correlation isn't causation!" they scream, while refusing to do the one study that would settle it: vaccinated versus completely unvaccinated children, long-term health outcomes. They say it would be "unethical" to leave children unvaccinated. Convenient.
The inflammation piece is critical to understand. We're essentially programming infant immune systems to be in constant red alert. Vaccine after vaccine, adjuvant after adjuvant, teaching their bodies that threat is everywhere, response must be aggressive. Then we wonder why this generation has unprecedented rates of allergies, asthma, autoimmune conditions. Their immune systems are attacking everything—food, pollen, their own tissues—because we've trained them from birth to be hypervigilant warriors instead of balanced defenders.
SIDS clusters around vaccination schedules. Two months, four months, six months—peak SIDS ages, peak vaccination ages. Babies who were fine go to sleep after their shots and don't wake up. The medical establishment says it's coincidence. Every time. Hundreds of parents reporting the same story—baby vaccinated, baby died within days—all coincidence. At what point do we stop calling it coincidence and start calling it signal?
The schedule itself is insane. In 1983, kids got 10 vaccines total. Now it's 72 doses by age 18. Did children suddenly become more fragile? Or did pharmaceutical companies realize they had a captive market with mandated products and zero liability? The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act removed all legal responsibility from vaccine manufacturers. You can't sue them. If your child is damaged, you petition a special "vaccine court" that's rigged against you. What other product has that protection?
Parents who watched their children regress after vaccines—losing words, losing eye contact, losing themselves—are gaslit by the entire medical establishment. "It would have happened anyway." "You're imagining things." As if questioning what harmed your child makes you the problem, not the product that caused the harm.
Your perfect newborn doesn't need protecting from diseases they're not at risk for. They need protecting from a system that sees their body as a pincushion for profit, their immune system as something to be programmed rather than nurtured. Every shot is a gamble with stakes they never agreed to.
Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders (Brain Inflammation and Damage)
Vaccination, Social Violence, and Criminality
Childhood Vaccination - Lies are Unbekoming
Silent Inflammation: The Biological Pathway to Autism
Real Autism Science - Lies are Unbekoming
The Trojan Horse: How Vaccines Deliver Aluminum to Infant Brains
16. Silver Nitrate Eye Treatment: Burning Baby's Eyes
Your baby opens their eyes for the first time, ready to gaze at your face, to begin that primal recognition that bonds you forever. And what do we do? Squeeze caustic chemicals into those perfect eyes, making them burn, swell, and weep for days. Welcome to the world, kid. We're going to hurt you now, just in case your mother is lying about her sexual health.
Silver nitrate in newborns' eyes—a practice from the 1880s when prostitutes were giving birth in charity wards and gonorrhea was rampant. Made sense then, maybe. But this is 2025. We have STD testing. We have prenatal care. Yet some hospitals still perform this barbaric ritual, burning every baby's eyes because of a theoretical risk that applies to almost none of them.
Let me describe what silver nitrate does: it causes chemical conjunctivitis. That's medical speak for "we burned your baby's eyes so badly they're inflamed." The eyes turn red, swell shut, and leak pus-like discharge for days. Your newborn, who should be peacefully gazing around their new world, is instead in pain, unable to see properly, fussing constantly. Parents panic—"What's wrong with my baby's eyes?" Nobody mentions it's not an infection; it's injury from the "preventive" treatment.
The bonding disruption is criminal. Those first hours are when your baby imprints on your face, when eye contact triggers oxytocin cascades in both of you. Instead, their eyes are swollen shut, tears streaming—not from emotion but from chemical burn. They can't see you. You can't see them, not really, not through the swelling and discharge. Breastfeeding becomes harder when your baby is in pain, when they can't find comfort in your gaze.
And for what? If you've been tested for gonorrhea and chlamydia—which virtually every pregnant woman in the developed world has been—your baby's risk is essentially zero. Zero. But they'll burn those eyes anyway, "just in case." In case what? In case you contracted gonorrhea during pregnancy and lied about it? In case the multiple tests were wrong? It's insulting, it's harmful, and it's medically unnecessary.
Even when there is genuine risk, we have better options. Erythromycin ointment works just as well without the burning. It's like choosing between cleaning a wound with soap or acid—both might prevent infection, but one causes unnecessary agony. Yet some hospitals cling to silver nitrate like it's 1884, like we haven't learned anything in 140 years.
The real kicker? Many places made this mandatory. Required by law to chemically burn your baby's eyes, no matter your STD status, no matter your protests. Some states finally allow parents to decline, but you have to know to ask, have to fight for the right not to hurt your baby. The default is still damage.
Babies after silver nitrate—eyes crusted shut, mothers crying because they can't comfort them, fathers angry but not sure at whom. The nurses shrug: "It's protocol." Protocol from when horses pulled carriages and women couldn't vote. Protocol that assumes every mother is diseased and every baby needs punishment for being born.
Other countries abandoned this practice decades ago. They test mothers, treat infections if found, and don't prophylactically torture newborns. Their blindness rates? No different from ours. Because it turns out that in the age of modern medicine, you can prevent neonatal blindness without burning every baby's eyes.
Your baby's first view of the world shouldn't be through a chemical haze. Their first sensation shouldn't be burning. There's enough pain waiting in life without starting it in the first minute.
17. Circumcision: The First Betrayal
They take him from you—this baby who's known nothing but warmth and safety—strap his arms and legs to a plastic board, and cut off part of his penis. No anesthesia in most cases, just a sugar-dipped pacifier if you're lucky. His screams are unlike anything you've heard from him before. Some babies go silent after a while, not from comfort but from shock. Their nervous systems simply shut down from the overwhelming pain. This is how we welcome boys to the world in America.
The foreskin isn't some useless flap of skin. It's 15 square inches of nerve-rich tissue when fully grown, containing thousands of specialized nerve endings. It protects the glans, keeps it sensitive and moist. It's there for a reason—evolution doesn't do accessories. But we cut it off babies like it's a manufacturing defect, then sell it to cosmetic companies for face creams. I'm not making that up. Your baby's foreskin might literally be in someone's anti-aging serum.
They'll tell you it prevents UTIs. The actual risk reduction? You'd need to circumcise 111 boys to prevent one UTI—an easily treatable condition. They'll mention penile cancer, so rare you're more likely to die from a lightning strike. Denmark, where almost nobody circumcises, has the same or lower penile cancer rates as the US. But these talking points persist because they need to justify what can't be justified: cutting healthy tissue off babies who can't consent.
The trauma is real and measurable. Circumcised infants show changes in brain function during subsequent vaccinations—their pain response is heightened, their stress hormones elevated. They cry longer, harder. Some researchers link infant circumcision to increased rates of anxiety disorders. That extreme early trauma rewires the developing brain. We're literally carving trauma into boys before they can even focus their eyes.
And for what? Because dad is circumcised and wants his son to "match"? Because we think intact penises are "dirty"? Europe doesn't circumcise. Japan doesn't. Most of the world doesn't. Their men aren't walking around with diseased penises. They just wash them, like we wash every other body part. Revolutionary concept.
The sexual impact—nobody wants to discuss this. Those thousands of nerve endings? Gone. The gliding mechanism that reduces friction during sex? Eliminated. The protection of the glans that keeps it sensitive? Removed. Men circumcised as adults report significant loss of sensation. But we do it to babies and pretend there are no consequences, like removing part of a sexual organ couldn't possibly affect sexuality.
The same people who'd be horrified by female circumcision will defend male circumcision. "It's different," they say. Is it? We're cutting genitals of children who can't consent. We're causing pain, risk, permanent alteration. The only difference is one is our culture's tradition, so we've normalized it.
The medical establishment makes millions from circumcisions—it's a quick procedure they can bill for, plus the profit from selling the tissue. The AAP won't take a firm stance against it because too many members profit from it. They hide behind "parental choice" when they'd never say that about any other unnecessary surgery on a healthy child.
Your perfect baby boy doesn't need surgical improvement. He needs protection from a system that sees his body as incomplete, as profitable, as requiring immediate painful modification. That foreskin is his, not yours, not tradition's, not medicine's. His body, his choice—except he doesn't get one.
Circumcision - Lies are Unbekoming
Part V: Undermining the Bond
18. Breastmilk vs Formula: The Living Food They Want You to Replace
Your body just built an entire human from scratch, and now it's producing the perfect food for that human—customized daily, hourly, sometimes feed by feed. Baby fighting an infection? Your milk makes antibodies for that specific pathogen. Growth spurt coming? The composition shifts to support it. It's alive, literally teeming with beneficial bacteria, white blood cells, stem cells. And the formula companies want you to believe their powder—made from corn syrup and industrial seed oils—is "just as good."
Formula is what you feed a baby when breastmilk isn't available. It keeps babies alive. That's the kindest thing I can say about it. It's a static, one-size-fits-all product that hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1960s, despite decades of research showing how inferior it is. The base is usually cow's milk or soy, processed to hell, supplemented with synthetic vitamins, sweetened with corn syrup. The first ingredient in most formulas is corn syrup solids. We're literally feeding babies sugar water with protein powder and calling it nutrition.
Meanwhile, breastmilk is doing things we're only beginning to understand. The oligosaccharides that feed beneficial gut bacteria while starving pathogens? Absent in formula. The living white blood cells that actively fight infection in your baby's gut? Not in that can. We're talking about hundreds of components that work synergistically, that change based on time of day, baby's age, even the climate. Your body is running a sophisticated laboratory, and we're comparing it to something mixed in a factory.
The IQ difference alone should end this debate. Every month of breastfeeding correlates with higher cognitive scores. Not because breastfeeding mothers are smarter or richer—studies control for that. It's the DHA, the cholesterol (yes, babies need cholesterol for brain development), the thousands of bioactive components that build better brains. Formula companies now add synthetic DHA, extracted from algae using hexane, and pretend it's the same thing. It's like comparing a symphony to someone banging on a pot.
Then there is the emotional sabotage. They convince mothers that formula is freedom, that breastfeeding ties you down. They don't mention the oxytocin rush that makes you feel like you could fight bears for this baby. The skin-to-skin contact that regulates their temperature, heart rate, blood sugar. The fact that breastfeeding mothers actually get more sleep because night feeds don't require mixing bottles. They sell formula as convenience while hiding that it means more sick days, more doctor visits, more everything except health.
The formula industry is worth $100 billion. They fund studies, they infiltrate hospitals with "free samples," they create fake grassroots organizations promoting "fed is best" when they mean "profit is best." They've convinced us that what mammals have done for millions of years is suddenly too hard, too inconvenient, not modern enough. They prey on mothers' insecurities, their exhaustion, their desire to do right by their babies.
And the long game? Breastfed babies have lower rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease—basically everything that kills us. Formula-fed babies have higher rates of all of it. We're setting up children for a lifetime of health problems to save corporations the trouble of supporting breastfeeding mothers.
Your body knows how to feed your baby better than Nestlé does. That's not opinion; it's evolution. The question isn't breast versus formula. It's whether we trust biology or business.
Breast Feeding - Lies are Unbekoming
Baby Formula and Breastfeeding - Lies are Unbekoming
19. Pacifiers: The Plastic Substitute for What They Really Need
Your baby cries, and someone—maybe a nurse, maybe your mother-in-law—shoves a piece of silicone in their mouth. "There, all better." Except it's not better. It's just quiet. That crying was communication, maybe hunger, maybe the need for comfort, maybe just processing being alive. But now there's a plug in it. Problem solved, if you define the problem as noise rather than need.
The damage starts immediately if you're breastfeeding. That pacifier teaches your baby a completely different suck pattern than your breast requires. The breast needs deep, rhythmic pulling that stimulates milk production. The pacifier? Just enough suction to keep it in place. Babies aren't stupid, but they are efficient. Given the choice between working for milk and getting easy comfort from plastic, some choose plastic. Your milk supply drops because your baby's not stimulating it properly. They're getting their sucking needs met by something that gives nothing back.
Nipple confusion is real, despite what the pacifier companies tell you. Babies who were nursing perfectly suddenly struggle after a pacifier was introduced—shallow latch, clicking sounds, frustrated crying at the breast. The mother thinks she's not making enough milk. Really, her baby just forgot how to drink it properly. All because someone couldn't tolerate five minutes of crying.
Then there's the addiction aspect nobody talks about. That pacifier becomes your baby's primary comfort source. Not you, not your breast, not their own thumb which at least they control—but a piece of plastic you have to manage. Two AM and the pacifier fell out? You're up. Eighteen months old and melting down because they can't find their "binky"? That's your future. You've created a dependency on something external, corporate-made, that you'll eventually have to break. Good luck with that.
Watch a toddler with a pacifier and you'll see what I mean about developmental interference. They're trying to babble, to form words, to explore their world with their mouth—nature's way of learning—but there's this thing constantly in the way. Speech development suffers. Their tongue doesn't learn proper positioning. They're literally muffled during prime language acquisition time.
The dental damage is visible by age two in heavy users. That perfect little palate starts narrowing, teeth coming in crooked, the whole facial structure adapting to accommodate this foreign object. Orthodontists love pacifiers—they guarantee future business. "Oh, we'll need to expand that palate," they'll say when your kid is seven, like it was inevitable instead of preventable.
And can we discuss the hygiene nightmare? That pacifier drops on the floor, gets "cleaned" with your shirt, goes back in the mouth. It sits in diaper bags growing bacteria, gets passed between hands at daycare, becomes a petri dish with a handle. You're literally training your baby to suck on contamination. But sure, it keeps them quiet.
The safety recalls should terrify you. Pieces breaking off, becoming choking hazards. Shields cracking, cutting mouths. These aren't rare events—there are recalls every year. We're stuffing potential choking hazards in babies' mouths because we can't handle the sound of their needs.
What babies actually want when they're seeking comfort? You. Your breast, your warmth, your heartbeat. For centuries, babies soothed at the breast or found their own thumb. Both are free, always available, impossible to lose at Target. But companies can't profit from your breast or your baby's thumb, so they convinced us babies need products to be happy.
That pacifier isn't soothing your baby. It's silencing them. There's a difference.
20. Co-Sleeping vs Cribs: Where Babies Actually Want to Sleep
For all of human history until about a hundred years ago, babies slept with their mothers. Every single night. Skin to skin, breath to breath, heartbeat syncing with heartbeat. Then suddenly we decided babies should sleep alone, in cages, in separate rooms, crying themselves to exhaustion while we watch them on monitors. And we wonder why modern parents are more exhausted than ever.
The American Academy of Pediatrics will terrify you about co-sleeping. "You'll roll over and suffocate them!" "It increases SIDS risk!" What they don't mention is that Japan, where co-sleeping is standard, has one of the lowest SIDS rates in the world. Or that the studies showing co-sleeping danger usually lump safe bed-sharing with passing out drunk on a couch with your baby—completely different scenarios. They create fear about the way humans have always slept with their young, then sell you a $500 "safe sleep" bassinet.
Here's what actually happens when you co-sleep: your baby regulates their breathing by feeling yours. Their temperature stays perfect against your body—no need for those sleep sacks they're suddenly too hot or cold in. When they stir to nurse, you barely wake, just shift slightly, latch them on, both drift back to sleep. Compare that to the separate room scenario: baby cries, you stumble down the hall, fully wake to feed, try to transfer them back without waking them (good luck), creep back to your bed, lie awake wondering if they're breathing.
The synchronization is profound. Mothers who co-sleep report knowing their baby is about to wake seconds before it happens. Your sleep cycles align. You're in lighter sleep when they need you, deeper sleep when they're settled. It's biological poetry that a baby monitor can't replicate. Your body is literally designed to be your baby's sleep environment.
But they've made us terrified of our own instincts. New mothers lie awake, exhausted, holding their babies in chairs because they're scared to bring them to bed. Babies who would sleep peacefully next to mom spend nights screaming in cribs, developing cortisol patterns that affect them for life. We're creating anxious, poorly attached humans because someone decided independence should start at birth.
The "back to sleep" campaign didn't reduce SIDS—it simply reclassified deaths. Miller's research shows that as SIDS diagnoses declined, deaths from "suffocation" and "unknown causes" rose proportionally, with 90% of the apparent reduction attributable to diagnostic reshuffling. The campaign was cover for vaccine injuries, launched strategically in 1994, eight years after the 1986 vaccine immunity law triggered an explosion in infant vaccinations. What actually reduces infant deaths? Breastfeeding, room-sharing, not smoking, and most tellingly—delaying vaccines, as Japan proved when they moved vaccinations from 3 months to 2 years and saw infant deaths drop by 90%. Ideally no vaccination at all. Countries that promote safe bed-sharing while supporting breastfeeding have better outcomes than us with our rigid separate-sleeping rules designed to deflect from the real killer.
They'll say you'll never get them out of your bed. Meanwhile, no teenager wants to sleep with their parents—they naturally seek independence when developmentally ready, not when forced at six months. They'll say it ruins marriages. Both parents stumbling down hallways at 2 AM, taking shifts with a screaming baby, accumulating months of sleep debt—that's the real intimacy killer. Cultures where families sleep together don't report epidemic divorce rates. They'll say babies need to learn independence. Independence from what—the warmth and heartbeat they've known for nine months? Your newborn's nervous system literally depends on your proximity for regulation. Their temperature, heart rate, breathing—all stabilize against your body. Forcing independence on a days-old infant isn't teaching resilience; it's denying biology.
The crib industry is worth billions. All those nurseries on Instagram, the monitors, the sleep training programs, the white noise machines—none of it necessary for most of human history. Your body is the perfect sleep environment: warm, familiar, responsive. Your breathing cues theirs. Your heartbeat is their home.
Safe co-sleeping isn't complicated: firm mattress, no gaps, sober parents, no heavy blankets near baby. Basically, don't be impaired and don't create suffocation hazards. That's it. Millions of parents worldwide do this every night without incident.
Your baby cries in the crib because biology tells them being alone means death. For all of human evolution, a baby alone was a baby about to be eaten. That terror is real, even if the tigers aren't.
The Safe to Sleep Campaign - Lies are Unbekoming
21. Controlled Crying: Teaching Babies That Nobody's Coming
Your baby cries at night. Every instinct in your body screams to go to them, but the sleep trainer's book on your nightstand says wait. Five minutes. Ten minutes. "They need to learn to self-soothe," it promises. So you sit outside their door, listening to them scream, watching the clock, your biology at war with expert advice. Your baby doesn't learn to self-soothe. They learn to give up.
That's what controlled crying really is—teaching despair. The crying stops eventually not because your baby figured out how to comfort themselves (they're neurologically incapable of that), but because they've learned nobody's coming. The stress hormones flooding their little body don't stop when the crying does. Cortisol stays elevated for hours, days sometimes. Their brain, desperately trying to develop healthy attachment patterns, gets the message: you're alone in this world.
The studies they cite to support controlled crying? Look closer. They measure whether babies stop crying at night, not whether those babies are okay. Of course they stop crying—prisoners stop rattling their cages eventually too. But the long-term research, the stuff sleep trainers don't put on their Instagram, shows these kids have higher anxiety, more attachment issues, difficulty with emotional regulation. We're creating a generation of humans who learned in infancy that their distress doesn't matter.
Meanwhile, cultures that have never heard of controlled crying—where babies are worn, held, responded to immediately—don't have our epidemic of anxiety disorders. Their teenagers don't need therapy to learn how to feel their feelings. Their adults don't struggle with intimacy because their first lesson in love wasn't abandonment.
"But they'll never learn independence!" the sleep trainers cry. Independence at six months? They can't even sit up reliably. Their brains won't develop the capacity for true self-soothing until they're preschoolers. What you're teaching isn't independence—it's that comfort isn't coming, that their needs don't warrant response, that they're fundamentally alone.
Here's what happens when you comfort instead: your baby cries, you respond. Their stress drops immediately—not just behaviorally but biochemically. Their brain learns: "When I'm distressed, help comes. The world is safe. I matter." This isn't spoiling; it's literally building the architecture of their nervous system. Each response weaves another thread in the safety net of their psyche.
The sleep trainers will tell you about mothers who are better parents after sleep training because they're rested. But you know what actually improves maternal well-being? Support. Help. A society that doesn't leave mothers alone with babies, exhausted and desperate enough to let their infants scream. Other cultures have grandmothers, aunties, communities. We have books telling us to ignore our crying babies.
They've monetized maternal exhaustion. Sleep trainers charging thousands to teach you to ignore your instincts. Apps that time how long your baby's been crying, as if there's a magic number where abandonment becomes pedagogy. Books promising your baby will sleep through the night, failing to mention that waking frequently is normal, healthy, developmental. The cruel irony? These sleep-deprived mothers, desperate for rest, are sold "solutions" that create stressed, cortisol-flooded babies who may sleep but at what cost? Meanwhile, the real solution—community support, shared caregiving, realistic expectations about infant sleep—remains absent. They profit from isolation, not from helping families thrive.
Your baby cries because they need you. Not want—need. Need like they need food, warmth, oxygen. Comfort isn't extra; it's essential. Those arms reaching for you, that desperate cry that makes your milk let down—that's not manipulation. That's survival. For all of human history, a baby whose cries weren't answered was a baby who didn't make it.
Trust your instincts over Instagram sleep coaches. Your baby isn't broken. They don't need training. They need you.
Part VI: The Alternative - Reclaiming Birth
22. Homebirth vs Hospital: Where Birth Still Makes Sense
Picture this: You're in labor in your own bedroom. The light is whatever you want it to be. You pace to the kitchen, lean against your own counter, maybe step into your garden to feel grass under your feet. When a contraction comes, you drop to all fours on your living room rug—the one your toddler spilled juice on last week. Nobody's checking your dilation. Nobody's watching a monitor. Your body does what bodies have done for millennia, and you're not on anyone's timeline but your own.
This is homebirth. Not reckless, not primitive, but perhaps the most radical act of common sense left in modern motherhood.
The research backs what intuition suggests: for low-risk pregnancies, planned homebirth with a skilled midwife is as safe as hospital birth. Actually, it's safer in many ways—lower rates of intervention, fewer cesareans, less postpartum hemorrhage. Turns out, when you don't interfere with birth, it usually works. Revolutionary concept, I know.
But safety isn't even the whole story. It's about what happens to you, physiologically, when you're not afraid. At home, your nervous system stays in parasympathetic mode—rest and digest, or in this case, rest and dilate. Oxytocin flows. Endorphins build. Your body knows this space, trusts it. You're not a patient; you're a woman having a baby in her own damn house.
Then there's water. Warm water that holds you, takes the weight off your joints, lets you float between worlds. The midwives call it "nature's epidural," but that sells it short. Water doesn't just dull pain; it transforms it. Contractions that felt overwhelming on land become waves you ride in the tub. Some women dilate from 4 to 10 centimeters in forty-five minutes once they hit the water. The relaxation is that profound.
And the baby—God, watching a baby born into water changes you. They emerge into warmth, still getting oxygen through the cord, no rush, no shock. They open their eyes underwater sometimes, looking around like, "Oh, so this is the next room." Only when their face breaks the surface does the breathing reflex trigger. It's so gentle, so obvious, that you wonder how we ever convinced ourselves that birth needed to be violent.
Midwives who attend homebirths often practice watchful waiting. They sit quietly, knitting or reading, occasionally checking heart tones with a doppler. When women hit transition and say they can't do it, experienced midwives often respond with something like: "You're right, you can't do it. You're already doing it." That's the midwifery model—trust disguised as wisdom. They know when to make tea and when to call 911. The difference is, they assume they won't need the latter.
The hospital approach typically involves directed pushing—women on their backs, legs in stirrups, purple-faced pushing while someone counts to ten. At home, women push when their bodies demand it, make whatever sounds they need to make, reach down and catch their own babies. In water births, babies often emerge calmly into warm water, then rest on their mother's chest for an hour or more before anyone suggests checking weight or measurements.
This isn't about being brave or special or crunchy. It's about recognizing that birth is not a medical event unless it becomes one. A bedroom is not inherently more dangerous than a hospital room. Actually, considering the lack of drug-resistant bacteria and interventional cascade, home might be safer for low-risk births.
The system wants you to believe homebirth is radical. The real radicalism? Forcing women to leave their nests and birth among strangers, under fluorescent lights, tethered to machines. That's the experiment. Home is where birth has always happened. We're just remembering.
The Midwife - Lies are Unbekoming
Interview with Dr. Stuart Fischbein - Lies are Unbekoming
Unassisted Childbirth - Lies are Unbekoming
Natural Birth in a Medical World: A Deep Dive into Modern Childbirth
Conclusion: Your Body Isn't Broken, The System Is
After twenty-two interventions, after examining the cascade from that first ultrasound to sleep training, the pattern is undeniable: this isn't healthcare. It's predation dressed in scrubs, exploitation wrapped in concern, a machine that feeds on mothers and babies while claiming to protect them.
They've medicalized every aspect of reproduction, from conception to your baby's first birthday. Each intervention creates the need for the next. Each "solution" causes problems that require more solutions. The electronic fetal monitor leads to Pitocin, which leads to epidurals, which leads to cesareans. The immediate cord clamping creates anemic babies who "need" formula supplementation. The circumcision trauma creates babies who "need" pacifiers. The separation at birth creates babies who "need" sleep training. It's not incompetence—it's design.
The numbers tell the story. Cesarean rates at 32% when up to 10% would capture true medical need. Circumcision still routine despite no medical society in the world recommending it. Ninety-nine percent of babies getting Hepatitis B vaccines for a disease they have zero risk of contracting. Five hundred women treated with RhoGAM to prevent one case of sensitization. Billions in profits from interventions that create the very problems they claim to solve.
But here's what they don't want you to know: women who refuse this system have better outcomes. Lower cesarean rates. Healthier babies. Easier recoveries. Stronger bonds. The Farm midwives proved it with thousands of births. Dutch homebirth statistics confirm it. Every study that actually compares supported, physiological birth with managed, medicalized birth shows the same thing: when you leave birth alone, it works.
This system survives on your fear and ignorance. It depends on you not knowing that your body can birth without Pitocin, that your baby can transition without being suctioned, that your breasts will make milk without formula "just in case." It requires you to believe you're broken, that birth is dangerous, that babies are incompetent, that nature got it wrong and only medicine can fix it.
The medical establishment has had decades to prove their way is better. Instead, they've given us an epidemic of birth trauma, a generation of microbiome-disrupted children, skyrocketing autism rates, and mothers so damaged by their birth experiences that they're terrified to have more children. They've taken the most powerful, transformative experience of a woman's life and turned it into a profitable emergency.
But you don't have to participate.
You can decline the ultrasounds that heat your baby's developing brain. You can refuse the due date that turns your pregnancy into a ticking time bomb. You can say no to the sweep, the induction, the "just in case" interventions that create actual emergencies. You can birth at home, in water, in peace. You can keep your baby's blood in your baby, their foreskin on their body, their microbiome intact. You can breastfeed without formula, sleep with your baby without fear, respond to their cries without consulting a sleep trainer.
Every intervention you refuse is a victory. Every mother who says "no" makes it easier for the next mother to say no. Every baby born without interference is proof that the system is lying.
They want you to believe you need them. The truth is, they need you—your compliance, your fear, your willingness to hand over your power in exchange for the illusion of safety. Without your participation, their system collapses.
Your body knows how to grow a baby. It knows how to birth a baby. It knows how to feed a baby. These are not medical events requiring management. They're biological processes perfected over millions of years, so sophisticated that despite decades of trying, medical science can't improve on them—only interfere with them.
The real question isn't whether you can birth without the medical system. You can. Women do it every day, all over the world, safely and powerfully. The question is whether you're ready to reclaim what they've stolen: your confidence, your autonomy, your birthright.
Trust your body. Trust your baby. Trust birth.
The only thing that's broken is the system that convinced you otherwise.
Your move.
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Baseline Human Health
Watch and share this profound 21-minute video to understand and appreciate what health looks like without vaccination.






Wow - I never knew this list was so extensive. You can also add the EMF of baby monitors to the list: https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/babymonitor
Looks to me that all of this is subtly designed to get a newborn off on the road to medical torture (drugs, vaccines, tests) and eventual death earlier than normal. These medical clowns are supposed to be the trusted experts with babies and overall health. What a freaking joke.
All vaccinations are poisons as are all drugs and that is one of the main reasons we are experiencing such poor health countrywide. Poisoning babies before, at and after birth is downright criminal in nature. Tens of billions of babies were born without ANY of this crap and most of them survived otherwise no human would be here on earth.