A few weeks after I had my first child, I ran into a woman from my prenatal yoga class who was still pregnant. She told me, sadly, that her baby was breech, and because her desperate efforts to get him turned around had failed, she was going to need a C-section. I told her that I’d had one too and it had gone great; coming home from the hospital with a healthy baby and no rips or tears except the incision on my abdomen made me feel like I’d gotten away with something. My response surprised her, because others she spoke to treated missing out on a vaginal birth as a great tragedy. “You were the only person who made me feel comfortable about it,” she told me recently.
Even if you believe, as many experts do, that America’s C-section rate is too high, such surgeries will always be necessary in a significant minority of pregnancies. (The World Health Organization considers a C-section rate of about 10% to be ideal.) Yet the natural-parenting movement, which purports to re-create the practices of a romanticized premodern past, often makes women who’ve delivered via C-section, or with epidurals and other medical interventions, feel like failures. And for some, the movement’s dictates blight the early years of parenthood with rigid expectations for exclusive breastfeeding, constant baby-wearing and co-sleeping. My liberal, upper-middle-class urban milieu likes to pride itself on trusting the science, but many of us are in thrall to a toxic ideology whose legitimate insights are braided with myth and pseudoscience.
The natural-parenting movement, like the anti-vaccine movement, relies on our forgetfulness about what life was like before the innovations that it denounces. Having a baby without medical help may be natural, but so is obstetric fistula and hemorrhaging to death. It’s a miracle of modern medicine that over the course of the 20th century, America’s maternal mortality rate declined by almost 99%. Not all mothers can breastfeed, and before the advent of baby formula, as the scholar Carla Cevasco wrote, “many families had to endure the agony of losing a baby to starvation, malnutrition or related disease.” When it comes to human reproduction, nature is neither kind nor efficient.
Reactionary roots
Also like the anti-vaccine movement, the natural-parenting movement is a reaction to very real failures in our medical system, which has more than earned people’s distrust. Many women have had experiences with OB-GYNs that leave them feeling disrespected and abused. Some doctors don’t take women’s pain — especially Black women’s pain — seriously. Some force unwanted and unnecessary interventions on women against their will. Midwives and doulas may give women the sustained, individualized attention that they should be getting from their doctors but too often aren’t.
But while natural parenting sells itself as a vehicle for women’s liberation from a patriarchal medical establishment, it is shaped by its reactionary roots. Amy Tuteur, a retired OB-GYN, former Harvard Medical School instructor and longtime foe of the natural-parenting movement, points out that Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician who coined the term “natural childbirth,” was a eugenicist who believed that “primitive” women didn’t experience pain in childbirth, unlike “over-civilized” white women. He regarded women’s fear of labor as hysterical and wanted upper-middle-class white women to get over it so that they’d have more babies. Ina May Gaskin, the grandmother of modern midwifery, called Dick-Read her “hero.”
La Leche League, which started popularizing breastfeeding in the 1950s, was founded by a group of Catholic homemakers with extremely traditional ideas about gender roles; as late as the 1980s, the group frowned on mothers of young children having jobs. When Dr. William Sears developed his influential theories on attachment parenting — a philosophy that promotes near-constant baby-wearing and co-sleeping — he was an evangelical Christian who believed that God had ordained women’s submission to their husbands. Natural parenting has since been thoroughly secularized, but it still preaches something akin to spiritual transcendence through female sacrifice.
Evidence is sparse
Though natural parenting makes substantial demands on mothers, in almost every case, the evidence supporting its tenets is either lacking or exaggerated. Take, for example, nursing. In developed countries, where access to clean drinking water to mix formula isn’t an issue, breastfeeding has some modest effects. “The evidence suggests that breastfeeding may slightly decrease your infant’s chance of diarrhea and eczema,” wrote economist Emily Oster, author of several books on pregnancy and parenting. But the other happy outcomes touted by breastfeeding evangelists, including increased intelligence, lower rates of obesity, and fewer allergies and behavioral problems, shrink or disappear when studies adjust for maternal class and IQ.
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Even if you distrust the natural-parenting movement, its pressures are hard to escape. Long before I was pregnant, my reporting on maternal health in countries without adequate obstetric care made me very suspicious of essentialist ideas about what Gaskin called “the ancient wisdom” of women’s bodies. During my first pregnancy, my sudden obsessive interest in birth led me to a harrowing phenomenon that I wrote about for The Daily Beast: traumatized women who’d lost babies during home births with unqualified midwives.
Nevertheless, when my first child needed more milk than I could produce, I was ashamed and hired a lactation consultant who had been profiled by this newspaper. She spoke to me with saccharine condescension and prescribed a regimen of round-the-clock feeding and pumping that would have sent me spiraling into postpartum depression if I’d stuck to it. The encounter was one of my lowest moments of early parenthood. Ironically, while there’s little evidence showing that breastfeeding is particularly important for babies, there’s quite a bit showing that maternal happiness is. If the natural-parenting movement really cared about children, it would do some introspection about how often it makes their parents miserable.
Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist.
