“Your cervix can dilate only to close”- this is not a thing I have ever experienced or heard of from a doctor or nurse (I have heard patients say that their dilation regressed, but I assume that either they were checked by two different people or their cervix started to swell after dilation arrested for a while).…

There are emergencies and then there are EMERGENCIES. Sometimes you can wait a little bit and see what happens, other times you really can’t. In a true emergency, you have ten minutes from when you make the decision to get the baby out, which means the goal is to get the mom under general anesthesia within about five…

I agree with your sister for the most part, although I suspect what she meant was “severe fetal distress”, because pretty much every baby experiences mild stress during labor at some point. We don’t freak out and do a C-section for every heart rate drop, because then everyone would have a C-section. It’s a hard…

So, as someone “in the biz”, there are different ways that babies’ heartrates can slow. Some are fine and not a big deal. Some are sort of a big deal but managed with position changes. Some are a really big deal and require immediate intervention. I don’t want to speculate on this lady’s situation because I have no…

I work in L&D. I don’t want to speculate about this particular situation, but I feel like I can provide some insight into how the idea that women should be able to consent or decline any medical intervention can get really messy. Here is what a true emergency C-section looks like- in the space of about thirty seconds…

Eh, I’m a white woman who works in healthcare and right after the election I found myself wishing I could tell my patients of color (particularly because we have a lot of Mexican/central American patients who may be undocumented) that I didn’t vote for Trump. I didn’t say anything, but I felt guilty that they might…

The default settings are in kilograms, you have to change it to pounds.

I get what you’re saying, I’m just suggesting that it’s not unique for groupthink to lead to a proliferation of certain trendy names. All trendy names become passe after a while, and the trendiest names right now aren’t particularly hard to pronounce- Kolt and Brookelinn aren’t on any top ten lists, Jayden is and it’s…

All names are cyclical, it’s not an unusual thing that certain names are popular right now. In my generation it was Kate. So many Kates. I don’t see the point of getting annoyed that different names get popular at different times- more people are likely to be exposed to them and decide they like them too.

I think you’re operating under the faulty assumption that if you tack as hard as you can to the most extreme position, it’ll help your cause instead of just making you look like an extremist. A 16 wk (or 22 wk) fetus surviving through huge technological intervention is not the same as a 36 wk baby surviving with…

“A fetus is NOT viable unless it is detached from the umbilical cord.”

How far are you willing to take this line of reasoning? A seven-month-old fetus is not a clump of cells, it is basically a viable baby. Is the precedent so much more important to you than the facts that you would refuse to call anything inside the womb a baby, even if it’s days from delivery? I find it frustrating to…

No. I don’t think it does. Just because you’re pro-choice doesn’t mean you have to hold the most extreme position possible (nothing is a baby until it’s born? Even a 38-week fetus?) in order to balance out the most extreme people on the other side. That’s not where I want to be, ideologically or morally. It sucks to…

I’m extremely pro-choice (and work in OB at a Catholic hospital, so... it’s a struggle), but I didn’t get the impression from the information in this write-up that we’re talking about a ball of unviable cells here. If we’re talking about like, a 25-week-old baby that should have gone to term, I don’t care what kind of…

My ex had the same idea, and then I figured it out and ruined his very well-meaning plan. The problem with this idea is that if you’re in a real relationship with someone, you need to be a team. A team doesn’t function when one of its members is hiding secrets and resolving issues that they think of as exclusively…

But don’t you think them handling the guilt on their own would affect your relationship in ways that you wouldn’t understand but would still perceive?

Been there dude. The lying was way worse than the cheating. Figuring it out on my own months later was crushing in a way that the cheating in and of itself wasn’t.

I think it’s fair to say there is literally no study that doesn’t include in its discussion, somewhere, “further research is needed.” No shit, that’s how research works! It all has to start somewhere small and if the small thing looks promising, you move on to something bigger. Research takes years to evolve on…

I’m really confused and pretty disappointed by the tone of this article. It seems to pretty much boil down to “ew, gross, ick.” I watched a pair of twins get delivered by C-section today and if you think swabbing a baby’s mouth with vaginal secretions is gross, you don’t have much imagination. They were still super…

Sure, but there are lots of words that describe bad things without being offensive. Like, the word gulag isn’t offensive just because I wouldn’t want to be in a gulag? The point is that he wasn’t using “ghetto” as shorthand for “place where scary black people live”, which is what’s generally offensive about the way…