This is why maternal request C-sections are important

From the Huffington Post in the UK, a blog post on How I Lost My Vagina.

Short summary: A woman and her gynecologist decide based on her mental health situation that she should give birth via C-section.  The gynecologist also observes that she has a narrow vagina and likely would have trouble delivering vaginally anyway.  The woman's care provider changes towards the end of pregnancy, and that care provider decides she should pursue a vaginal delivery.  The vaginal delivery results in a fourth-degree tear that is either impossible to repair or repaired incorrectly.  As a result, her vagina and rectum are one hole, she has significant scarring, she can't use tampons, she can't enjoy sex, she feels psychologically like a freak show monster, etc.

But she wasn't on the list of socially approved indications for C-section, so too bad for her.

Fuckwit Anti-Vax Cousin Chronicles, Part 1

This actually happened.

Really, Ben and Jerry's?

After this sad business with Kevin Folta, I went to console myself with a pint of ice cream.  Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby, to be exact.

What did I see on the container?  Ben and Jerry's uses only fair trade and non-GMO ingredients. That seems a little bit silly to me.  It's like saying, "We don't believe in taking economic advantage of people in impoverished countries, but we'd be really upset if they used biotechnology to improve their standard of living."

But is it kosher?

From the great folks at The Questionist:

I'm assuming this homeopathic remedy does not use kosher Muscovy duck liver.  Batel b'shishim, the principal that an unkosher contaminant does not render a kosher substrate unkosher if it is less than 1/60 of the total volume of the mixture, shouldn't apply because the Muscovy duck liver was added intentionally.  On the other hand, there's no actual duck liver in this anymore, so it would be more accurate to say that any molecules from the duck liver are there by accident than it would be to say that it intentionally contains duck liver.

On the third hand, the rules for medications are different than those for food.  But is something considered medication because the doctor administering it says it is, or because the patient believes it's medicinal?  In other words, do the leniencies for medicine apply?

Yes, this is what religious Jews do for fun.  There's a reason Jesus complained about this in the gospels.

RIP free speech and academic freedom

Sad news - Kevin M. Folta is no longer going to be doing public science outreach due to the relentless harassment from the anti-GMO crowd.  The folks in the know seem to believe that his employer has asked him to stop.

Folta announced yesterday on Facebook, "Hi Everybody. I'll keep it short. The attacks are relentless, I'm under a lot of pressure on many fronts. I'm taking the opportunity to disappear from public visibility and focus on my lab and my students. It has been a challenging time. I appreciate the support, I'm grateful for your wishes, but this battle is vicious and one-sided, and I think I'm well served bowing out of the public science conversation for the foreseeable future. Thank you."

Just to re-cap, Folta is a professor in biotechnology at the University of Florida. As part of his work, he conducts (or, rather, conducted) public outreach to explain advanced in biotech, including genetic modification. The anti-GMO crowd, fans of global starvation and malnutrition that they are, realized that U. of Florida is a public university, which means that Folta is technically an employee, which means that they can use the Freedom of Information Act to dig up dirt on him. And so they filed an FOIA request for all of his e-mails.

The only "juicy" tidbit they found was that he that he was repaid by a biotech firm for expenses incurred in coming to speak at an event.  This is hardly shocking.  Public university's like Folta's were founded under the 1865 Merrill Act for the express purpose of conducting agricultural research and educating the country's farmers in order to improve the American economy.  So not only did Folta not actually earn any money from speaking, but coming to speak was part of his freaking job.

The truly chilling part is that Folta's entire e-mail correspondence - conversations with students, chitchat with family, all of it - is now in the hands of people who believe he's the devil incarnate because he's doing science they don't like.  Ironically, this are the same kinds of people who freely invoke Galileo when they want to defend the fact that everything they say is in complete contradiction to the scientific consensus.

Folta is the main target, but no academic at a public institution is immune.  In agricultural science, that's quite a lot of them.  No wonder U of Florida is feeling touchy.  Of course, this model can be expanded to any field.  Want to get women or minorities out of the public sphere?  Just issue an FOIA request against them.  Think that the bias in academia against conservatives hasn't done a good enough job in ensuring ideological purity?  FOIA any conservative professor who says things you don't like.

Of course, let us not forget the main losers in the entire debacle - the rhetorical starving children in Africa.

New feature: Recipes! Beef ragu sauce thing.

Cooking blogs are popular, right?  So here's what I'm going to do.  I've decided to start including recipes on this blog.  The only rule is that the foods must be healthy, affordable, easy to prepare, and use at least 90% ingredients that stay usable for at least a month in the pantry, fridge, or freezer.

Maybe at some point, I'll even do videos!

Today's recipe is ground beef in a tomato sauce.  This recipe is great served over just about any starch, including rice, pasta, mashed potatoes, or bread.  You could probably also use it as a lasagna filling.


Serves: 3-4 adults
Cooking time: 20-30 minutes

Ingredients:
oil of your choice
3 cloves of garlic (optional)
1 small onion (optional)
2 lbs ground beef
1 small can crushed tomatoes
1 heaping tbsp tomato paste (optional)
1 can of carrots and/or peas
spices of your choice

Steps:
1. Heat oil in a medium sauce pan.  You just need enough that the beef won't stick, so use less if you are using a fattier mix.  If you want to use fresh garlic or onion, sautee it now until golden but not burnt.
2. Add the beef, stirring until all signs of pink are gone.
3. Add the tomato stuff and the spices.  For my spices, I like to add a bay leaf, oregano, black pepper, and a small amount of chili powder.  You can also use garlic and/or onion powder instead of adding garlic and/or onion at the beginning.
4. Drain the water from the canned vegetables.  You may also want to give them a rinse to get rid of any salt or sugar added in the canning liquid (I buy with only salt added and then don't add salt with the other spices).
5. Let simmer for 5-15 minutes (the cooking time really is that flexible at this point) while you get your starch ready.
6. Serve over starch and enjoy!

Want to do a good deed?

The pro-science, anti-abusing-children-in-the-name-of-pseudoscience crowd is atwitter after a naturopathic quack/childbirth "educator" named Heather Dexter bragged about letting her three children, including a freaking infant FFS, suffer through whooping cough without even once consulting an actual doctor or a hospital or anyone qualified to treat the disease.

The original post she wrote has been taken down, but you can read snippets of it here, here, and here.  The entire post is a sickening display of egocentrism ("Oh, it was so hard for *me* to watch my children cough until they turned blue and vomited!") and a willingness to let innocent kids suffer unnecessarily for the sake of pseudoscience.

A few facts that can come in use for sensible people:

1. Her children wouldn't have gotten sick at all, or would have been less severely ill, had she vaccinated them;
2. If she had sought medical attention quickly enough, the first child to get sick could have received antibiotics, which would have prevented transmission of the disease;
3. Even if the window for prophylactic antibiotics had passed (one the whooping starts, it's too late), the other children could have taken antibiotics for the few weeks the first kid was contagious in order to prevent catching the disease;
4. There are all sorts of therapies the children could have received in the hospital that would have eased their suffering and perhaps shortened the duration of the disease.

Now, what about this good deed I mentioned?  It turns out that this woman has a business page on Facebook.  See, it turns out that, while her children were deathly ill, she continued to see pregnant women and fragile babies.  I think her clients deserve to know that she will knowingly expose them and their newborns to deadly diseases.  If you do, too, hop on by to Earth Mother's Natural Health & Birth Services and give her a 1-star review.  The best part is, she can't delete negative reviews!

Some thoughts on the WHO

The WHO has announced that bacon will kill us all, except for my husband, who will die of pastrami instead.  The decision to classify processed meats as a Class 1 carcinogen has all sorts of flaws, which have already been picked apart by the mainstream press, so I won't go into them here.  What interests me is how society is willing to be skeptical of the WHO when it comes to bacon but completely credulous when it comes to controlling women's bodies.

There are two areas in particular where the word of the WHO is considered sacrosanct: C-section and breastfeeding.

In the past year, the WHO published a study on the relationship between C-section rate and mortality in low-income countries.  The researches observed that mortality didn't improve when the rate exceeded 10%, and concluded that women in these countries should be discouraged from requesting C-sections without a medical indication so that more resources are available for the women whose babies might die without them.

The "low-income" part is critical to understanding the study.  There is no such thing as an ideal C-section rate, and breech presentation shows why beautifully.  The danger with breech presentation is that the baby's head gets stuck on the cervix while the rest of the body is out, compressing the umbilical cord and causing asphyxiation.  We know based on historical studies that, even when the medical practitioner is experienced in vaginal delivery of breech babies, 1 in 800 babies will die and many more will suffer permanent brain damage.  There is no way to predict ahead of time who the unlucky babies will be.

If you live in a developed country where there is no question that the mother can get a repeat C-section for the next delivery, then it is a no-brainer to deliver breech babies by C-section because C-section is an order of magnitude safer.  However, if you live in a country where the mother may very well not be able to get a C-section at the next birth, performing a C-section is sentencing the mother and the next baby to a 1 in 100 chance of dying.

Nevertheless, the media and mommy shamers went wild for the WHO study, bashing women in developed countries who choose to give birth by C-section.  Basic facts were ignored, including: no country with tolerable perinatal and maternal mortality rates has a C-section rate below 20%; in countries where there is no shortage of doctors or materials necessary to perform C-sections, pre-labor C-section is demonstrably safer for the baby (and potentially but not clearly more dangerous for the mother) than attempted vaginal delivery for up to 3 births; and the WHO has an embarrassing history of making statements about C-section rates based on no data whatsoever and then quietly dropping them.

The same sort of logic happens with breastfeeding.  In areas without access to clean water, exclusive breastfeeding saves lives by keeping dirty water out of infants' guts and giving them valuable antibodies that help protect against diarrheal diseases.  There are, unfortunately, places on the planet where it is safer for babies to drink HIV-infected breastmilk than it is to drink formula prepared with the local water.  Extended breastfeeding is beneficial, even after the child starts digesting those antibodies instead of benefiting from them, simply because it reduces exposure to contaminated water.

In developed countries with clean water, the benefits are much, much smaller.  Even the WHO, in a study that somehow magically never gets cited by breastfeeding bullies, admits that the only proven benefits to breastfeeding for healthy terms babies are statistically fewer minor illnesses during infancy.  Furthermore, the WHO was founded to give public health recommendations to low-income countries.  It stopped providing income-specific recommendations when it saw that doing so generated distrust of its recommendations and got in the way of its work.  This is a matter of historical fact.  It is not up for debate.

If you ask breastfeeding advocates, though, the WHO's recommendations apply to all countries.  Sometimes these recommendations are used in a benign way, such as in an attempt to eliminate the stigma towards extended breastfeeding.  Usually, though, they are used to tell women who do not exclusively breastfed that, "Nanny nanny foo foo, you aren't doing the best for your child like I am, and the World Health Organization says so."

The WHO does a lot of valuable work.  Like all large organization, it also does silly things sometimes as well.  I wish women wouldn't use the WHO to attempt to rob other women of their bodily autonomy.

It's a good thing I have a sense of humor

Some days, religion is about loving thy neighbor as thyself.

Other days, it's about bringing a piece of fabric soaked with your vaginal discharge to an old dude with a beard so he can tell you when you can start having sex again.

And I'm okay with that.

The NY Time goes Bamba!

Bamba! Bamba! Bamba!

The writer of this article in the NY Times Magazine would almost certainly be shocked to know that, at least among American transplants to Israel, Bamba is considered worthless junk food.

Why?

I suspect very highly that it's because poor people eat it, too.

If you are a certain kind of parent, you assume that any food that is a staple in the local diet must be unhealthy.  Wheat, cows' milk, corn, all must be replaced with more expensive alternative, like wheat and goat milk.  And so, this kind of parent (let us be honest, it's just mothers) goes onto mothering forums and asks for healthy alternatives to Bamba.

I'm actually a big fan of Bamba.  The first ingredient is "peanuts (50%)."  There's no added sugar.  It's fortified with vitamins and iron.  The stuff is definitely more healthy than regular teething biscuits, which are mostly starch and sugar.

So eat your junk food, kids!  It's good for you.

In a first, the NY Times doesn't follow the "natural" party line

Courtney Jung has written an excellent article that concisely explains many of the points I am making here about breastfeeding.  You should read it.

Her argument is as follows:
1. The benefits of breastfeeding are dramatically oversold for the sake of supporting breastfeeding;
2. Women as a result feel compelled to breastfeed, whether or not they want to;
3. This conveniently restricts women's bodily autonomy and economic freedom;
4. It also conveniently allows society to continue defining good parenting to mean whatever society's elites prefer to do.

I'm just enjoying not being the only person saying it.  It is very telling to me that women's preferences are rarely given even a perfunctory mention in discussions on breastfeeding, even though we know that women whose infant feeding choices aren't respected are at higher risk of postpartum depression.

Sorry, dudes named Yoni

Is there some reason we can't call vaginas "vaginas" anymore?  Your vagina isn't any more spiritual just because you call it the Sanskrit word for vagina instead of "vagina."  Just two cents from someone for whom "yoni" is a guys' name.

With "non-judgmental support" like this, who needs sanctimommies?

I really need to stop participating in mommy groups on Facebook for the sake of my own mental health.  In these groups are two local individuals who seem to be the "go-to" women for lactation consulting and childbirth classes/doula services.  Both of them, of course, advertise themselves as supportive of mothers and their personal preferences.  And both of them need to shut their dang mouths.

I had nothing against the doula until last night.  A friend in one of these groups asked about VBAC versus RCS.  The doula actually said that the risk of uterine rupture is no higher for VBAC than it is for first-time mothers!  For the record, the risk of uterine rupture for VBAC is estimated to be between 0.5 and 1 per 100 births.  I don't know about primips specifically, but the rate of uterine rupture in an unscarred uterus is 0.7 per 10,000 deliveries, or 100 times as rare as during VBAC. (Source: http://www.uptodate.com/contents/rupture-of-the-unscarred-uterus)

The LC, however, is a real nasty piece of work.  She was recommended to me when I specifically asked for recommendations for an LC who is supportive of combo-feeding.  Thank G-d I didn't hire her because, as far as she's concerned, combo-feeding and supplementation are terrible for the baby's health.  Oh, and women should be forced to have vaginal deliveries when at all possible.

According to the LC:
1. Supplementing ruins the microbiome in the baby's gut;
2. Formula feeding can lead to chronic health problems later in life;
3. The WHO's recommendations are applicable for developed countries.

So let's take these claims one by one.
1. Formula supplementation *does* change the microbiome in the gut. However, there's no evidence whatsoever that this difference is at all meaningful.  How do I know this?  Because:
2. There are no proven long-term health benefits to breastfeeding.  Every single study that supposedly shows a difference either failed to control for confounding factors or the difference disappeared as soon as those factors were controlled for.  Basically, most breastfeeding studies haven't proven that breastfed babies grow up to be healthier; they've shown that wealthy women breastfeed and poor women don't.
3. I'm not sure why natural fallacy types think the WHO was founded.  In any event, the WHO does not maintain separate medical recommendations for developed countries because they discovered that developing countries don't trust you when you do that.  This is a matter of historical fact.  Formula feeding in the West isn't dangerous just because there are many impoverished countries with no clean water and no regulations for the production of formula.

And since ethics are just as important as science here, let's all take a brief moment to be shocked (SHOCKED!) that a woman who makes a living telling other women how to use their bodies to feed their babies also thinks she has the right to tell a woman how she ought to give birth.

In which I discover the existence of TERFs

And now, for something completely different.

I admit that I've been mostly ignoring the Caitlyn Jenner hubbub.  My initial reaction was, "What's a Bruce Jenner?  Oh, this is sports news," meaning that I had almost tuned out before I realized that this was a story about a prominent person coming out as trans and I should probably make the effort to care.

That changed once I saw the backlash, not from the usual easily freaked-out right-wingers, but from purported feminists.  Apparently there is an entire category of feminists who earnestly believe that transgendered people are subjecting themselves excruciating levels of harassment and violence solely to reinforce the patriarchy.  A representative example of this genre can be seen here.

For readers who are trying to avoid heartburn, the basic gist is that gender identity is a social construct developed to persecute people with vaginas, that women are women because their brains have been molded by that persecution, and therefore, trans women are not real women and are actually complicit in this persecution by reinforcing gender roles.

What astounds me more than any other aspect of this theory is the breathtaking cruelty required to believe in it.  Transgendered people are at increased risk of violence, sexual assault, poverty, and homelessness.  Forty-one percent of transgendered people in the US say they have attempted suicide. Just how malicious and incapable of compassion do you have to be to see all this and decide to pile on?  How blinded by hate are you to say that someone would choose to submit themselves to that in order to persecute YOU?

Let's get one thing straight.  While gender *roles* are socially constructed, often in a way that benefits men at the expense of women, the existence of trans people pretty much proves that gender *identity* is innate.  Don't go crapping on the marginalized of the marginalized just because they disprove your pet academic theory.

I'm foaming at the mouth at this point a little bit, so I'll just sum up some of the other, less grating flaws of the article:
1. It tells feminine women that they are inferior feminists;
2. Saying, "I'm not a woman because of my genitals; I'm a woman because the neurological effects of the persecution I have suffered on account of my genitals" is still a form of gender essentialism;
3. The fact that trans advocates, like activists for every other cause on the planet, sometimes go to silly extremes is not legitimate justification for saying that transwomen aren't real women;
4. It's not easy to enjoy male privilege when being considered male causes you significant mental distress;
5. You just said that it isn't genitalia that makes women women, so why are you quantifying who really counts as transgendered based on whether or not they've had gender reassignment surgery?;
6. Have you even considered that more gender reassignment surgeries might be performed on women (and no, they aren't men, even though they have penises) because the risks and expenses involved are less, leading many transmen to say that just presenting as male is sufficient?

Trans issues aside, there's something I find profoundly disturbing about the idea that being a woman is all about negative experiences, as it implies that there is no value in being a woman.  For me, at least, being a woman is less about my physical body and more about my actions.  As long as I have a kick-ass matzoh ball recipe, there is value in me being a woman.  I don't want feminism to mean that we degrade everything women have produced and achieved as being inferior.

A good explanation of why natural childbirth is sexist

A recent article by Hadley Freeman in the Guardian nailed what's so wrong about the natural childbirth movement. Some of the best quotes:

"Few things drive the British press quite so demented as the thought of a pregnant woman with a choice... An individual! After all, we know that as soon as conception happens, a woman stops being her own person but is instead generic 'mum', and should be talked to accordingly."

"This reflects a worldwide increase [in C-sections], and is thought to be the result of 'a combination of doctors believing surgery is safer in potentially difficult births and women choosing not to undergo labour', neither of which sounds much like a terrible cause."

"It is quite something to watch how what is erroneously described as 'natural childbirth' – as though childbirth involving medical intervention is fake, or 'lesser' – has shifted ... to being yet another stick with which to accuse women of being insufficiently self-sacrificing as mothers."

"As anyone who has been to a certain kind of pre-natal 'support group' knows, for a woman to say – admit, even – that she will avail herself of all the pain relief and opt for a c-section is tantamount to admitting you plan to give your kids heroin to keep them quiet during EastEnders."

"The self-indulgent veneration in the media today of 'natural childbirth' is downright offensive in a world where women still die every day because they don’t have access to different childbirth options."


Here's the full article: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/29/obsession-natural-birth-judge-women-pregnant-medical?CMP=soc_567

Why I make my own baby food

Are baby food pouches a well-off white person thing?

 

I confess, my big crunchy habit is making baby food at home.  One of the baby's first vegetables was even kale.  But I'm nothing if not non-idological, so when we decided to go on vacation, I started looking to buy those baby food pouches.

 

Why can I not find any baby food pouches that are not organic and non-GMO?  There is this weird distinction between the pouched food and the food in cups/jars that I cannot figure out for the life of me.  It's like someone declared, "Quinoa and kale must be completely segregated from peas and carrots!  We shall package them differently so everyone knows who cares about their child's nutrition and who is too poor to be a good mother."

 

All I want is to feed my baby solids without giving him food poisoning due to lack of refrigeration.  I don't see why I need to pay the organic non-GMO premium to do it.

Is Michel Odent defending eugenics or Lamarckian evolution?

For anyone who is not familiar with Michel Odent, he is the pet OB of the natural childbirth movement.  Basically, he is to natural birth as Dr. Sears is to anti-vaxxers and as the other Dr. Sears is to Attachment Parenting.

 

Dr. Odent has some rather strange beliefs, including that the presence of the father during childbirth can cause medical complications, and that women who get C-sections or Pitocin are biologically incapable of bonding with their children.

 

The latest bit of drivel from Dr. Odent, published in the Telegraph, is that women are losing the ability to give birth vaginally due to the use of life-saving medical interventions and this is a BAD THING.

 

So, there are basically two directions you can go with this argument.  The less horrifying possibility is that Dr. Odent believes in Lamarckian evolution.  You guys may remember from your grade school biology classes that Lamarck thought that, if you cut off a lizard's tail, the lizard's offspring would be born without tails.  You may also remember that this view of evolution is dead wrong* as demonstrated by the lack of tailless lizards running around.  Giving a woman a C-section will not render her daughters incapable of delivering vaginally.

 

Here is the more horrifying possibility.  Dr. Odent is such a big fan of natural childbirth that he would rather let mothers and babies die in childbirth than allow women to pass on genes (such as those for small pelvic openings or dangerously long pregnancies) that make birth without intervention impossible or inadvisable.

 

 

*Unless you consider epigenetics, which Lamarck wasn't, and that's a whole other discussion that is also being grievously abused by natural childbirth advocates.

Antibiotics are overused. They are also lifesaving.

A Canadian woman is being tried for the entirely preventable death of her 7-year-old from strep throat.  Since I read that piece of news, two different mothers started crowing in my Facebook mommy groups about how great they are for not starting their children on the antibiotics, relying on herbal and folk remedies instead.

The first case involved a suspected ear infection.  The doctor indicated that she believed an ear infection was developing, but that it was too early to tell and offered antibiotics as a preventative measure.  The mother said she would rather not give antibiotics, and the doctor acceded on the condition that they return in three days to see if the redness was clearing up.  It had gotten better, so antibiotics were not needed.  The mother attributed this to her careful winter regimen of vitamins and herbal supplements.  She also believes that this is a typical case of antibiotics being overprescribed, rather than a demonstration of her being wealthy enough to take off an additional day from work on short notice to track the development of the suspected infection.

The second case involved pink-eye contracted at daycare.  The doctor prescribed an antibiotic ointment.  The mother said she'd rather not.  The doctor insisted that she use it if the eye wasn't getting better alone within 24 hours.  At the end of the day, there was clearly no improvement, so the mother crowd-sourced for potential remedies, even though, by her own admission, she knew the ointment is safe.  Her argument was that the pharmaceutical companies have us tricked into believing that our bodies cannot heal themselves, and she would rather her son's body learn to deal with such infections instead of relying on antibiotics.  It was pointed out to her that the immune system doesn't work like that and that eye infections can easily cause irreversible vision damage that cannot be fixed with glasses.  She accused the objectors of derailing the conversation.

I know that overuse of antibiotics is an issue.  When people don't use antibiotics as prescribed, or when doctors proscribe them for viruses, it leads to an increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria.  Furthermore, antibiotics are hardly benign, often causing digestive issues.  It makes sense to question the doctor on why antibiotics are being proscribed.

What I don't get is how the parents in the above examples can be so cavalier with their children's health.  In the US in 1900, the top three causes of death were infectious diseases (pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea/enteritis).  Of these, 40% were in children under 5.  And that doesn't even count all the children who suffered permanent damage to their hearing, vision (Helen Keller, anyone?), and lungs before they successfully fought off the infection.

Why Skeptics Need to Take Theism Seriously

I'm a big fan of scientific skepticism, meaning that I do not accept statements as true without the scientific evidence to back them up.  I also happen to be a theist.  Since there is a very strong vein of antitheism in scientific skepticism, I thought I'd start off with a discussion on why skeptics need to be less dismissive of theism, ordered from least to most nitpicky.

Note: I use the term "theistic skeptics" to describe people like me, who love both science and religion.  There is already a term "skeptical theists."  Those are people who solve the problem of how an omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent god could allow gratuitous evil to exist by saying that we mere mortals have no way of judging whether some particular evil is gratuitous.  Totally different thing.


1. Theistic skeptics have practice separating science and superstition

Theistic skeptics are [hopefully] aware of the difference between knowledge based in reason and belief based in faith.  The most prevalent form of superstition today is pseudoscience.   Pseudoscientists try to sound valid by using real scientific terms, such as toxins and immunity.  For someone who accepts science but is not educated in it, it can be difficult to know which claims are actually scientific and which are pseudoscientific.

Theism can be very useful here.  When your religion is obsessed with ritual purity, hearing someone talk about keeping their body/their children's bodies "pure" of chemicals sets off a 1,000-klaxon alarm.


2. The ethical arguments against woo are just as powerful as the scientific

Obviously, you do not need religion to be an ethical person.  But science is not an ethical system.  That is why we have ethics boards to approve human research and certain medical decisions.  Pseudoscience is not only scientifically wrong; it is morally wrong.

When you say you won't vaccinate because vaccine-preventable diseases are only dangerous to children who are not healthy, what you are implicitly saying is that you are okay with unhealthy (imperfect?) children dying preventable deaths.  When you frame breastfeeding as essential to health and to mother-child bonding, you are simultaneously denying women autonomy over their own breasts and implying that women whose bodies cannot support a growing infant are worse mothers.

The appeal to nature is not merely a fallacy; it is deeply ableist.


3. Antitheists lose respect when they make ignorant comments about religion

You know what's really annoying?  When you are an expert in oncology, you are up-to-date on all the latest research on the genetic component of cancer, and some shmuck comes along telling your patients that they brought cancer on themselves through bad diet and can fix it with coffee enemas.  Or when you are a biologist and all your major discoveries have been built on the assumption that evolution exists, and some shmuck comes along and says that dinosaur fossils were placed by God to test our faith.

You know what's equally annoying?  When you've read multiple ancient and medieval commentaries on Genesis that state outright that the creation story clearly isn't meant to be understood as scientific truth since daylight precedes the sun's existence by 3 days, and some schmuck comes along saying that evolution disproves the entire Bible.  Or when you spend a month learning about what it really means when we talk about monotheism, which turns into a whole discussion on how monotheistic faiths differ in their understanding of the nature of God and the universe, and then Richard Dawkins writes a book where he devotes one paragraph to saying that monotheists are dumb because why is one god any different than two.


4. Antitheism in the skeptic community belies Christian privilege

The distinction between religion and culture is never absolute, even in Christian countries, but it is completely meaningless if you belong to a tribal religion.  As a result, there are many religions, of which Judaism is probably the largest, where getting rid of religion would essentially require total cultural annihilation.

Science, Religion and Mommy Blogging

I was inspired to start writing for two reasons:

1. I became a mother, and discovered that pregnancy, childbirth and parenting are areas rife with dangerous woo;
2. The strong strain of anti-theism in the skeptic community is a) overly dismissive of people who believe in a deity or maintain a religious identity and b) counterproductive to getting society at large to adopt scientific skepticism, with detrimental effects for humanity.

One last item I want to address before I start blogging for real.  A lot of mommy blogs and forums and such like to say that they provide support, not judgment, before they go on to bash anyone who doesn't mirror their choices back to them.  Well, this isn't one of those blogs.  I don't approve of "to each their own" in cases where the science is clear, and I don't approve of judgment where the science isn't.  There will be no mollycoddling here.