Recently I heard an interview with an Amy Tuteur arguing that natural childbirth has been over-promoted. One of her arguments: “It’s important to go back a little to the history of the natural childbirth movement. . . . Now, most people don’t realize that the natural childbirth movement was created in the 1930s and 1940s by Grantly Dick-Read, who was a British obstetrician. He was also a eugenicist. And he was preoccupied — as were many eugenicists in the 1930s — with the problem of what he called ‘white race suicide.’ He bemoaned the fact that white women of the so-called ‘better classes’ were having fewer children . . .”
Somehow Dick-Read tied this in to promoting his theory of how childbirth should work. Like many people pushing an ideology, he promoted some ideas that seem valid to me (like that mothers and newborns shouldn’t be separated in the hospital by default). Many of his other ideas about it seem really bad — for example, that women shouldn’t be informed about risks of childbirth because he claimed that labor pain was caused largely by fear.
The fact that he was clearly motivated by an ideology is reason to suspect his medical recommendations. He doesn’t seem to have been troubled by facts that contradicted his theories. But at this point, when we’re assessing childbirth policy, it’s just not that relevant that the guy who promoted natural childbirth in 1933 was also a eugenicist who viewed women’s role as a “factory” of healthy babies.
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You can cast suspicion on lots of ideas this way. A lot of early twentieth-century intellectuals had some interest in eugenics, and so a lot of ideas that were floating around in the early twentieth century were at some point favored by someone who was also a proponent of eugenics.
Some people who wrote in favor of some form of eugenics:
- Alexander Graham Bell
- Helen Keller
- Winston Churchill
- Margaret Sanger
- W.E.B. Du Bois
- John Harvey Kellogg, as in the cereal company
- Linus Pauling
As far as I can tell, these people’s interest in eugenics doesn’t tell you anything useful about how good or bad their other ideas were. There’s no point in being suspicious of telephones or corn flakes because they were invented by eugenicists.
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Going back to Tuteur’s interview, she does sometimes draw a distinction between something’s past and its present:
“Did formula companies do a terrible thing in Africa in the 1970s? Absolutely. They did. And formula companies should be demonized for that. But that doesn’t mean we should demonize formula.”
She’s referring to the concern beginning in the 1970s that the inappropriate promotion of baby formula in developing countries led to the deaths of children. Providing free formula in hospitals led mothers to formula-feed their babies there, while their own breastmilk dried up. Then mothers needed to buy formula afterwards, even if they didn’t have access to safe water or enough money to buy adequate quantities of formula. Since contaminated water and malnutrition are major killers of babies in developing countries, this is a big deal.
I find it a bit rich that Tuteur is willing to tar natural childbirth because of the guy who promoted it 90 years ago, but is more pragmatic about the fact that formula is useful and safe for families in high-income countries.
But I think this pragmatism is basically right. Even when something has a genuinely bad past, I’d like to see us pay more attention to how it’s being used now, and what effects we expect to see from its use now and in the future. And those effects might still be bad! But if not, it would be a shame to continue to avoid it.
[…] previously complained about parts of this interview with obstetrician Amy Tuteur about natural childbirth, but I agree […]