The author of the NYT piece is retired ob/gyn Amy Tuteur, and she’s been saying this for years on her Skeptical OB blog. The US’s first and most basic problem is the CPM “qualification” that allows people with little to no medical training to masquerade as competent health care providers. The subsequent deaths and…

They are TERRIBLE! Autistic kids are always treated like burdens on their family—you should be SCARED of autism because your autistic kid will RUIN YOUR LIFE! My fav ad is one where a woman—in front of her autistic daughter—admits she once considered driving them both off a bridge and only didn’t because of her…

Autism Speaks is the worst. Their official position may be “we don’t know if vaccines cause autism” (which of course is bullshit) but they routinely host presenters who do at their conferences.

I read an AskReddit thread last month asking autistic individuals what they wished people knew about their lives. One of the highest-rated comments was from an autistic person saying that Autism Speaks was a “horrible” organization, and a lot of people on the Spectrum chimed in saying similar things, that the…

This has nothing to do with autism, and everything to do with honesty.

Yeah. It’s worth noting that quotes about the safety of home birth in foreign countries are meaningless considering CPMs and lay midwives and direct-entry midwives would all be locked up if they tried to practice there. Good for you for helping your friend!

Nurse Midwives are advance-practice nurses with a graduate degree or higher. They go to school for 6-8 years or more.

As the basis for a scientifically valid medical education, it’s pretty damn important.

Meanwhile, abortion clinics in some states have more rigorous regulation than open heart surgery.

So much this. A friend quite liked the idea of a midwife-attended birth because of the lower intervention rate, which is cool; but when I realized she didn’t know the difference between CPM and CNM I staged an immediate intervention. She ended up being referred by her CNM for an emergency C-section. By all means plan…

“It was entirely free”

Because if a woman dies in childbirth, it’s all part of God’s plan (yes, I have actually heard that from some fundies...).

Because they let people like the poorly educated Duggar girls become “midwives” without real training. Real midwives are extensively trained, certified, and accept evolution because they’ve studied biology.

Especially when the mystery is “why did my baby die?”

“no central agency that oversees the certification of midwives”

Sometimes regulation is a VERY good thing.

Interesting how people want to regulate what can be done with a fetus, but all bets are off when that fetus is coming in to the world.

The GOP exists because their base either believes in the Just World fallacy or has a Dunning Krueger cognitive bias.

I understand why wealthy people vote republican but I’ll never understand why immigrants support republicans. My father & his side of the family are immigrants and they’re the same way. You’d think you’d want to support fellow immigrants instead of burning the bridge behind you. It’s a lot of “I got mine!”. And…

Her cause could be "Make Marriage Great Again," essentially, "how to deep-throat your rich husband to keep him away from the other bimbos" is something she would probably be qualified to champion. It would be like returning to the Mad Men era, as far as male-female relationships, "Meet your man at the door dressed in…

I’m trying so hard to think of what her “initiatives” would be as a first lady and can’t even come up with anything stupid but plausible enough.