Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2: Now let's talk about childbirth.
Speaker 3: It's hopefully the last time you touch your mom's vagina.
Speaker 3: And I learned about child birth firsthand because I recently
Speaker 3: had a baby.
Speaker 2: I don't know, she was right here, I don't know.
Speaker 2: You can't have it all, can't you.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: I chose to have a home birth because I wanted
Speaker 3: to ruin my couch, And it turns out I was
Speaker 3: pretty lucky because whenever I talked to a woman who
Speaker 3: has given birth in a hospital, it's almost always a
Speaker 3: horror story. The labor was painful, the doctors were rude,
Speaker 3: the nurse pooped on the table and blamed it on me.
Speaker 3: But there's a reason why hospital childbirth leads to all
Speaker 3: these horror stories, and it's something I want to talk about.
Speaker 3: So lay back and put your feet in the stirrups
Speaker 3: for tonight's long story shirt. Childbirth is the number one
Speaker 3: reason why people go to the hospital in the US.
Speaker 3: It sends more Americans to the hospital than the allergic reactions.
Speaker 2: And oh, I don't know how this got's stuck in
Speaker 2: my butt. That's a light bulb, just so you know.
Speaker 3: And every year the healthcare system makes fifty billion dollars
Speaker 3: from childbirth, and yeah, half of that is just from
Speaker 3: Nick Cannon, but it's still a booming industry. And why
Speaker 3: is childbirth so expensive? Because, like everything in America, healthcare
Speaker 3: is a business, and hospitals look at our uterus like
Speaker 3: it's an atm.
Speaker 5: Delivering Moms are increasingly being charged sky high prices for
Speaker 5: absolutely every service or supply provided to them and the baby.
Speaker 5: And those bills aren't just high in many cases, they're bloated.
Speaker 3: Every time you walk into the hospital, they look at
Speaker 3: everything that happens to you and say.
Speaker 6: Can I build for that?
Speaker 3: It's because they can, they can charge more. Nobody's asking questions,
Speaker 3: and so they do and they get away with it.
Speaker 5: Doctor Marguerie Dwayne delivered naturally just twelve minutes after arriving
Speaker 5: at the hospital and only stayed one night.
Speaker 2: I noticed I have been charged for two hospital nights.
Speaker 1: I was charged for medications I didn't receive, such as
Speaker 1: oxytocin nine hundred and fifty eight.
Speaker 2: Dollars for his nursery stay.
Speaker 1: And he didn't spend one minute nurse and he didn't
Speaker 1: spend one minute in the nursery.
Speaker 5: One woman says she was charged four hundred dollars for
Speaker 5: motrand and a stool softener.
Speaker 3: Four hundred dollars for a stool softener? What is this
Speaker 3: a hotel mini bar? If you don't have stool softener
Speaker 3: in your hotel mini bar, you gotta go to a
Speaker 3: better hotel. And all that money doesn't even equal better care, because,
Speaker 3: like I said, healthcare is a business, and a business
Speaker 3: wants to be efficient, but childbirth isn't efficient. Labor could
Speaker 3: happen at any moment, or it could take over eighteen hours.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like orgasms.
Speaker 3: Is this gonna be a quickie or is someone leaving
Speaker 3: here with carpal tunnel?
Speaker 2: Nobody knows.
Speaker 3: Childbirth is messy and unique and complicated, and it needs
Speaker 3: the mother to walk around and stretch and bounce on
Speaker 3: a yoga ball and go to the bathroom because maybe
Speaker 3: you're gonna take a dump.
Speaker 2: Or maybe that's where you're gonna have the baby. I'm serious.
Speaker 3: That happens a lot, and it's beautiful, But the hospital
Speaker 3: would rather have us laying down with sensors attached to
Speaker 3: our bodies because it's more efficient to monitor all of
Speaker 3: it at once from a computer screen. Even those screens
Speaker 3: should be for raising our children, not birthing them.
Speaker 2: So here's what happens.
Speaker 3: Now you're lying in a bed and your labor slows down,
Speaker 3: so the hospital speeds up the process by pressure you
Speaker 3: to take the drugs that induce labor, even though those
Speaker 3: drugs affect the heart rate of your.
Speaker 2: Baby and increase your pain.
Speaker 3: So then they suggest an epidural where the jam a
Speaker 3: needle a fentanyl to your spine to numb your lower body.
Speaker 3: But now you can't feel your lower body, which means
Speaker 3: you can't help push through through your contractions. And now
Speaker 3: you're slowing down your labor again. Your baby's heartbeat is
Speaker 3: going up and down. It's like a little ravenside your uterus,
Speaker 3: and the doctor comes and say.
Speaker 2: You're not progressing enough. The baby's heartbeat it is erratic.
Speaker 2: All the shit we made you do is made everything worse.
Speaker 2: Why would you make us do all that shit to you?
Speaker 3: And that brings us to the biggest medical intervention.
Speaker 2: Of all sea sections. Americans have them at.
Speaker 3: An alarmingly high rate, and it doesn't even and it
Speaker 3: doesn't always have to do with the health of the
Speaker 3: mother or the baby.
Speaker 5: An alarming number one in three women giving birth in
Speaker 5: America today having a sea section, but too often sea
Speaker 5: sections are not needed.
Speaker 7: Sometimes doctors or hospitals may rush a sea section simply
Speaker 7: because they think labor has gone on long enough. For
Speaker 7: because the maternity ward is especially busy.
Speaker 3: Another reason for the major increase, just for the sake
Speaker 3: of convenience.
Speaker 2: Softer's are rushed. I mean, when someone's giving birth bachually,
Speaker 2: it can take a.
Speaker 3: Long time there in labor, it can take days, sea
Speaker 3: section very quick.
Speaker 2: You're ining your out.
Speaker 3: Sea sections are major surgery and they carry all the
Speaker 3: risks of surgeries.
Speaker 2: You give a sea section in twenty eighteen, you have
Speaker 2: a ninety percent chance of having a sea section the
Speaker 2: second time.
Speaker 3: A second time it's some more complicated surgery, and the
Speaker 3: third time it can be like operating on a melted
Speaker 3: box of crayons.
Speaker 2: Melted box of crayons.
Speaker 3: Jesus, what happens the fourth time?
Speaker 2: We don't even need to do surgery. It just pops
Speaker 2: out like.
Speaker 3: Alien And sections aren't just risky for the mother, they're
Speaker 3: also risky for the baby. Children born via sea sections
Speaker 3: are four times more likely to develop breathing problems. And
Speaker 3: if my kid is gonna have trouble breathing. I want
Speaker 3: it to be because I raised a douchebag who vapes.
Speaker 2: Is that cotton candy?
Speaker 3: There's got to be a better way to do this,
Speaker 3: and thankfully there is, and it's not some new fangled
Speaker 3: silicon valley birthing pod. It's one of the oldest childbirth
Speaker 3: technologies there is, midwives. A midwife is a clinician who
Speaker 3: helps you either birth inside of a hospital or outside
Speaker 3: of a hospital. And for women with uncomplicated pregnancies, midwives
Speaker 3: are a great idea, mostly because they don't do unnecessary
Speaker 3: interventions and they're all about patient autonomy. Can you imagine
Speaker 3: that woman having autonomy? Not in my America, Let's go Brandon.
Speaker 3: In fact, midwives used to be the Norman delivery until
Speaker 3: they got pushed out in favor of Marle doctors.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen hundreds, physicians someone on a very
Speaker 1: effective smear campaign against midwives. They would make posters showing
Speaker 1: a black branding midwives and a very poor home delivering
Speaker 1: a baby and saying would you want this kind of
Speaker 1: person to deliver your baby? Joseph de Lee of Chicago
Speaker 1: called midwives relics and barbarism for me, it.
Speaker 2: Appears brutal midwifery, not up. It is not the portable,
Speaker 2: but it is the man behind the comm.
Speaker 3: The man behind the forceips is what counts. No, you idiot,
Speaker 3: We don't need you, your forceips, your racism, or that
Speaker 3: weird landing strip go to you got going on? Really
Speaker 3: the point I want to make here the hospital doesn't
Speaker 3: just emphasize efficiency and speed over the mother's health and comfort.
Speaker 3: It emphasizes the doctor's role over the mother's particularly when
Speaker 3: obstructrics was being created by men. And it's such a
Speaker 3: male thing to think that pulling the baby out is
Speaker 3: the entirety of labor when all mothers know that's the
Speaker 3: easiest part of the whole thing. It's like pulling a
Speaker 3: piece of toast out of the toaster and saying I'm
Speaker 3: the toaster. So long story short, for women thinking about
Speaker 3: having a child, no, and understand what your options are
Speaker 3: and what and that this is your birth, not the hospitals,
Speaker 3: not the doctors. And look, don't get me wrong, there
Speaker 3: are pregnancies that need medical interventions, but when the hospital
Speaker 3: needs don't align with yours, remember you have choices. Just
Speaker 3: because you're in a hospital doesn't mean you're sick. Childbirth
Speaker 3: isn't a disease. It's powerful and natural and we should
Speaker 3: give women the chance to experience that. And as a
Speaker 3: side benefit, it'll free up all the hospital to figure
Speaker 3: out how this got up my book. When we come back,
Speaker 3: I'll talk to an expert on childbirth, Doctor Stewart Fishbine.
Speaker 4: So don't go away. Welcome back to the Daily Show.
Speaker 3: My guest tonight is a community based practicing obstetrician and
Speaker 3: advocate for the midwifery model of care and human rights
Speaker 3: and childbirth. He also co hosts the Birthing Instincts podcast
Speaker 3: and teaches seminars on breach and twin vaginal birth around
Speaker 3: the globe. Please welcome, Dr Stewart Fishbeine. It's so great
Speaker 3: to have you here.
Speaker 6: It's an honor to be here. And I just have
Speaker 6: to say the last segment was you covered so much.
Speaker 6: That's so true, and I, as a male physician, was embarrassed.
Speaker 6: I walk in the footsteps of all the midwives that
Speaker 6: came before me and taught me what I didn't necessarily
Speaker 6: learn in residency.
Speaker 2: I see, Look, men can give credit to women. It's great.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: You know you've been You've been in this field for
Speaker 3: so long. Why do you think there's so much fear
Speaker 3: around childbirth?
Speaker 6: Because fear is the strongest emotion that you can control
Speaker 6: people with. And I think the reason that we have
Speaker 6: so much fear in the Western medical world is because
Speaker 6: the people that are practicing, the doctors are taught to
Speaker 6: fear birth. They're taught birth is a medical condition, that
Speaker 6: it needs treatment, that it's chaotic, and that we have
Speaker 6: to control that chaos, and so they're fearful. And if
Speaker 6: you talk to most birth workers, they have that sense
Speaker 6: of fear, and then they projected onward to the women
Speaker 6: who of America in other countries and so and it's
Speaker 6: all you see. I mean, not that the media is
Speaker 6: always bad, but sometimes there's a lot you know, when
Speaker 6: you see birth and it's very dramatic and it's you know,
Speaker 6: it's very and there's a lot of fear, and so
Speaker 6: it's propagated that way, and then you can control people
Speaker 6: when you have fear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, Yeah, it's a very good tool.
Speaker 3: And you know, and child birth can be such like
Speaker 3: a lovely thing, and it should be a lovely thing
Speaker 3: because you.
Speaker 2: Know, we are all you know, we're all born at
Speaker 2: some point and it's just.
Speaker 3: Your entrance into the world, is I think significant?
Speaker 6: And if I can say, if we just take a
Speaker 6: step back for a second and we look at how
Speaker 6: other mammals do it, this can give us a vision
Speaker 6: into why what we're doing is not working so well.
Speaker 6: Because when a mammal goes into labor, where.
Speaker 2: Does she go?
Speaker 6: She goes off by herself, who does she go with? Nobody?
Speaker 6: And when she's hungry, she does this amazing thing. She eats, thirsty,
Speaker 6: she drinks, and if she's uncomfortable, she moves. And when
Speaker 6: she if she's interrupted in labor through the predator approaches
Speaker 6: or the little kids run into the bedroom, the mammal
Speaker 6: will put out hormones like adrenaline which will stop their
Speaker 6: contractions and they'll get up and they'll run away, and
Speaker 6: only when it's safe will nature will labor return. And
Speaker 6: this way nature ensures that the best chance of success.
Speaker 6: So what we do in the medical model is essentially
Speaker 6: antithetical to nature's design. From the moment a woman gets
Speaker 6: in her car to drive to the hospital, and actually
Speaker 6: I would say all through the prenatal care period two
Speaker 6: to the moment she puts her baby in the car
Speaker 6: seat to drive home. Pretty Much everything that's done to
Speaker 6: the woman is opposite of what nature has designed, and
Speaker 6: it not surprising that labor then doesn't go as well
Speaker 6: as it should. That we have such high intervention rates
Speaker 6: thirty forty percent c section rates some countries it's seventy
Speaker 6: to eighty percent. We have we're inducing women set thirty
Speaker 6: fifty eighty percent of women, and certain hospitals are being induced.
Speaker 6: I mean, how many cows get induced? You know, that's
Speaker 6: sort of it's just the medical model sees birth as
Speaker 6: a problem. The Midwiffery model sees birth as a normal
Speaker 6: function of a woman's body that they trust that nature
Speaker 6: has a design, and every time you intervene in that design,
Speaker 6: you will cause some ripple effect downstream, whether immediate or later.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's interesting because I think we forget that we
Speaker 3: are animals because and particularly in birth in my case,
Speaker 3: it's like it was the most animal you feel. You know,
Speaker 3: you end up you're in these positions where you're like,
Speaker 3: I don't I never pictured. I didn't know how my
Speaker 3: birth would go, and I never pictured what actually happened.
Speaker 3: But it was like, you do you get in these
Speaker 3: whatever positions, most comfort. You're making these guttural sounds you've
Speaker 3: never made before, and all of it's just happening to you.
Speaker 3: And I was lucky enough to experience it in a
Speaker 3: way that you know where I was at home and
Speaker 3: it was it was comfortable, and I was allowed to
Speaker 3: do all those things.
Speaker 6: Yeah, if you let a man will do or a
Speaker 6: woman do what she wants to do, it's amazing to
Speaker 6: watch how they will. They will move, they'll do something.
Speaker 6: The baby's not sitting right in the pelvis instead of
Speaker 6: laying on their back with an epidural numb and they
Speaker 6: can't help their baby. They can move. You'll watch them.
Speaker 6: They'll put a leg up on the side of the bed,
Speaker 6: they'll squat, they'll get on all fours, they'll do certain things.
Speaker 6: The medical model has taken all that away, and now
Speaker 6: we're stuck with you know, eighty percent of women getting
Speaker 6: induced and in some hospitals ninety percent of women getting epidurals,
Speaker 6: and that breaks that connection that women and their babies have.
Speaker 6: It's a beautiful symphony of hormones that's been going on
Speaker 6: from the moment of conception, and once that gets interrupted,
Speaker 6: the baby's sort of left on its own defend. When
Speaker 6: a woman gets an epidural, it's mom is no longer
Speaker 6: being able to help it. And so you see that,
Speaker 6: like you described in your last segment, you see that
Speaker 6: change in the fetal heart rate, and then we've got
Speaker 6: to do something. And then they get a baby that's
Speaker 6: perfectly fine from a C section and they say, great,
Speaker 6: we saved your baby, and actually it was all the
Speaker 6: iatrogenic stuff that happened in the first place. Midwives, on
Speaker 6: the other hand, is because they trustpers so well and
Speaker 6: they accept uncertainty. And I can tell you from experience,
Speaker 6: and I've been doing this forly forty years. The first
Speaker 6: twenty eight of them I was in the hospital, the
Speaker 6: last twelve or thirteen I was in the home birth world.
Speaker 6: We don't see that sudden deterioration of fetal status that
Speaker 6: you see in the hospital when you don't meddle with
Speaker 6: mother nature.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, I think we really understell how
Speaker 3: you come into the world is important. And I just
Speaker 3: I wish more women knew that this was an option,
Speaker 3: even because a lot of women they would never even
Speaker 3: you know, it's become.
Speaker 2: Like a it feels like people are like ooh, this like.
Speaker 3: Kind of alternative like woo woo, you know, like, oh,
Speaker 3: you're very odd you had a home birth.
Speaker 2: And I was like, I don't know, I just maybe
Speaker 2: maybe I'm lazy.
Speaker 6: No, I mean, people will often this is an interesting
Speaker 6: thing when when we talk on the podcast we talk
Speaker 6: about the c setur raping too high or epidural rping
Speaker 6: too high. We'll get letters or direct messages or whatever,
Speaker 6: but tell us that we're shaming somebody. We're not shaming anybody,
Speaker 6: but they're starting to project a little bit of their
Speaker 6: own guilt on the fact that maybe things didn't go
Speaker 6: the way they wanted to. All we want to do
Speaker 6: is let people know that they have these choices and
Speaker 6: these options, and that's not something you're getting in the
Speaker 6: medical model. You can't do in a five minute, six
Speaker 6: minute prenatal visit what a midwife does in an hour
Speaker 6: prenatal visit. You just can't. And I feel for my
Speaker 6: colleagues that are sort of in the hamster wheel of
Speaker 6: the medical model that they can't get out because the
Speaker 6: one thing that's really happened that in my lifetime that
Speaker 6: I saw that was really bad was doctors became employees
Speaker 6: of hospitals and hospital systems, and then their loyalty and
Speaker 6: their fiduciary do became compromised because as a solo practitioner,
Speaker 6: my responsibility is the woman that I'm caring for. As
Speaker 6: a doctor working in a hospital setting, if they don't
Speaker 6: want you to do vbacks vagual birth after sincerity, where
Speaker 6: they don't want you to let anyone go past forty
Speaker 6: one weeks, then you'll have to skew your counseling to
Speaker 6: get the woman to do what your system wants to do,
Speaker 6: not what the doctor wants to do. And you know,
Speaker 6: I don't know that there's a lot of happy obstetricians
Speaker 6: out there. I don't think that a lot of them
Speaker 6: really like what they do, and that's why a lot
Speaker 6: of them give up ob They go through all that
Speaker 6: training and then they come out and they just don't
Speaker 6: want to do it anymore. A lot of nurses leave nursing,
Speaker 6: they leave ob nursing because they just can't watch what
Speaker 6: goes on there.
Speaker 3: And my experience with a midwife is that I got
Speaker 3: a lot of prenatal care, but which is very important,
Speaker 3: but I also got a lot of post natal care,
Speaker 3: which is also very important. Now my midwife came to
Speaker 3: my house every day after the birth and then you know,
Speaker 3: like every couple days, and she was very involved in
Speaker 3: the after birth process, and I think that's also something
Speaker 3: that's missing.
Speaker 2: It's almost like you.
Speaker 3: Have the baby and then you're pushed out of the hospital,
Speaker 3: like literally in a wheelchair, and then.
Speaker 2: It's like naig luck, I'll see you in six weeks. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6: When I was a resident, you never see a normal
Speaker 6: birth as a resident because you're not watching women in labor.
Speaker 6: You're called to the deliver room or to the labor
Speaker 6: room when the nurses need you to do something, so
Speaker 6: they never watched the sounds that you make, or the
Speaker 6: things that you're saying, the guttural sounds, or the movements
Speaker 6: that a woman that makes. You never know what the
Speaker 6: normal progress of labor is. So nothing is moving fast enough.
Speaker 6: So every time you're called to the room, you're asked
Speaker 6: to do something. You put on a glove, you do
Speaker 6: a vagil exam, you order potocin, you rub your membranes,
Speaker 6: you do these things. And this is how young doctors
Speaker 6: are being trained to look at childbirth when they really
Speaker 6: should back off. Maybe fifteen percent of women need medicalized
Speaker 6: hospital based care. The other eighty five percent, if the
Speaker 6: hospitals would leave them alone, could do it without much
Speaker 6: intervention at all. The problem is is that hospitals don't
Speaker 6: make money doing nothing. They make money doing something, and
Speaker 6: so there is they won't do that, and they just
Speaker 6: they will not leave a woman alone. And they can't
Speaker 6: make a hospital more home like adding curtains and a
Speaker 6: hardwood floor to a labor room doesn't make it more
Speaker 6: like home. They just they don't know how to leave
Speaker 6: a patient alone. They just don't know how to do it.
Speaker 6: And even calling them patients, I just made an error.
Speaker 6: We call them clients in our world because they're not sick.
Speaker 6: It's like breathing or it's like digestion. These are these
Speaker 6: are innate functions of our body. They're primitive brain functions. Fortunately,
Speaker 6: most of us don't have to think about breathing or digestion.
Speaker 6: Can you imagine thinking breathe in, breathe out. You can't
Speaker 6: do that. But when you have pneumonia or when you
Speaker 6: have colitis, you need a doctor. But you don't need
Speaker 6: a doctor to breathe, or to digest food, or to
Speaker 6: get pregnant, or to go through your You're prenatal care,
Speaker 6: or to deliver a baby. These are all natural functions
Speaker 6: that nature has designed. And again I want to reiterate,
Speaker 6: every time you intervene in Mother Nature's design, there is
Speaker 6: going to be consequences. Even my co host Bliss likes
Speaker 6: to say, even if when you walk in the room
Speaker 6: when a woman is in labor and you quietly ask
Speaker 6: them can I get you anything? Or how are you doing,
Speaker 6: you're actually bringing them out of their primitive brain into
Speaker 6: their cognitive brain, and you're slowing down the labor process.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it would be nice if we could just believe,
Speaker 3: you know, women can do it.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm living proof that they can.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And.
Speaker 6: I'm living proof that somebody who went through the medical model.
Speaker 6: You know, I was trained in a very academic program.
Speaker 6: I was actually very lucky because the program I worked
Speaker 6: at was affiliated with a very, very busy hospital. It's
Speaker 6: actually the busiest hospital in the country back in the
Speaker 6: early eighties, and so I learned the breach and twin,
Speaker 6: but I also learned that it was a medicalized process.
Speaker 6: And only coming out and being open to the fact
Speaker 6: that I was approached by midwives to take their home
Speaker 6: birth transports and I didn't do it because I thought
Speaker 6: midwifrey was smart or homebirth was smart. I probably thought
Speaker 6: it was stupid, like most doctors do. But I did
Speaker 6: it because I wanted to make money in those days, right,
Speaker 6: But I was pression enough to listen to what the
Speaker 6: midwives had to say and to learn from the women
Speaker 6: who were in labor that they didn't have all the
Speaker 6: things that I thought they needed, and they still did
Speaker 6: find right. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, amazing, it's amazing.
Speaker 3: It's really, it really is amazing. Thank you so much
Speaker 3: for coming on to talk and thank you. Thank you
Speaker 3: for doing the work that you do.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Welcome.
Speaker 2: Can I say one more thing good?
Speaker 6: Today is my daughter's twenty seventh birthday, and I want
Speaker 6: to wish my daughter medal in a very happy birthday.
Speaker 2: Happy Birthday.
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