The lonely scientist rants.

[rivka]

"[Rh incompatibility] wasn't an issue for all of human history until interventions were performed, like episiotomy and early cord cutting or Cesarians. Again, what gives?"

Okay, I have to get this off my chest here, because if I say it in response to the actual post I'm quoting I'll probably be banned:

For God's sake, isn't some kind of basic education in logic and science required in the schools? Don't people listen to themselves when they talk?

(Okay, never mind, I know the answers to those questions: no, and no.)

Rh factor wasn't even discovered until 1939. For "all of human history until interventions were performed," in that golden age of medical-provider-free natural homebirths in which nothing ever went wrong and there was no maternal or perinatal mortality, there was NO WAY TO TELL if Rh incompatibility existed.

Sometimes your baby was stillborn. Sometimes your baby had heart failure shortly after birth. Sometimes your baby was incredibly weak and sickly, but pulled through. And that was ALL YOU KNEW. It's not like your fellow tribeswomen would've stood around nodding sadly and saying, "Yep, this baby has hemolytic disease of the newborn. Just look at these abnormal red blood cells, which you can clearly see through the microscope I made out of vines and bark."

And even after the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century... even after the discovery of blood grouping at the turn of the 20th century... people still had no freaking idea why some newborns developed hemolytic disease and died. You could go from one end of the world to the other and never hear a single person utter the phrase "Rh incompatibility." THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT NO ONE EVER HAD IT.

I'll be the first to agree that there are plenty of screwed-up things about standard medical management of pregnancy and birth. However, I solemnly assue you: Rhogam for Rh incompatibility is not among them. If you are Rh- and your partner and baby are Rh+? Get. The. Freaking. Shot.

Comments

[guruwench.livejournal.com]

Oh, for the love of little green thingies to tie plastic bags closed. What you said, cubed and squared and cubed again.

[ex-serenejo.livejournal.com]

Oh, for the love of little green thingies to tie plastic bags closed.

*guffaw*

[irismoonlight.livejournal.com]

*headdesk*
Hopefully someone made enough of a related point to embarrass said poster into silence? Because... wow.

[naomikritzer]

I am 90% confident I know where Rivka was reading, and if you say anything "unsupportive," i.e., contrary to the accepted pseudoscientific gospel, you get banned.

[boxofdelights]

I'm actually relieved that that was just anti-science stupidity.

I first thought that the quoted statement meant "let nature take its course. . . by wiping out the Unfit."

[redbird]

Maybe delete the first to paragraphs, and post the rest, sans all-caps and maybe without the "even" before "discovered"? Or are you not supposed to point out that people who think nothing went wrong in non-assisted home births before the obstetrician was invented are living in a fantasy world?

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I agree with these edits. I can't imagine banning you over pointing out some facts about the history of science.

[graceo.livejournal.com]

But science is all about cursing us with side effects and complications! It can't do good things!

Did you miss the post a few weeks back (OK, maybe months now) where a poster was upset about a project that she saw mentioned on a Doritos bag because bringing stable electrical systems to hospitals in developing nations will lead to over-reliance on incubators and keep mothers from doing kangaroo care?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

No, no, I saw that one.

Yikes.

[naomikritzer]

This is MDC, yes? Do you ever read the Unassisted Childbirth forum? OMG THE STUPID IT BURNS.

I visit MDC only for the trainwreck factor anymore. It was actually my very first parenting-related message board: I bought a copy of Mothering, saw an ad in the back for the message board, and was very much a regular for quite a long time when my older daughter was little. Then came the day Peggy O'Mara discovered the board and was TOTALLY SCANDALIZED that MOTHERS (MOTHERS!) were exchanging tips on blow-job technique. The board has never been the same since.

I subscribed to Mothering for a year, but around the time I got the renewal notice in the mail, they had the issue with the very pregnant Christine Maggiore on the cover to go with their article about how HIV was a plot by the MAN to make people take bad, toxic drugs. I did not re-subscribe. There are things about the magazine that I really like, but they don't make the fanatical devotion to pseudoscience tolerable to me.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

MDC only has one forum worth visiting, the Working Mamas one. The rest is just too obnoxious to bother with. Gentle Discipline is one of the scariest places ever.

[wiredferret.livejournal.com]

I could weep. I feel exactly that way about anti-vax nutjobsadvocates. I get so angry I can't even engage them in discourse.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

I get especially angry about that sub-population when I see news stories like one that hit recently here in Chicago -- apparently we have a fairly substantial measles epidemic ongoing. And it's not like tuberculosis outbreaks, that we have because of immigration of nonvaccinated (or infected) adult outsiders ... this is taking root, and spreading, through kids in our preschools and grade schools whose parents are anti-vax, and got waivers signed to permit their plague-carriers to attend school anyway.

Edited to add: and in our case, it was mentioned in a couple of stories that it took longer to start addressing it as an epidemic because *most new doctors have never SEEN a case of active measles*, so didn't diagnose it right away.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

Oh, gods. This is Logic 101. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc)

Would it be too much to post the link I've offered as a reply? I wouldn't want to get you banned, but at the same time, ignorance like this should not go unchallenged.

[graceo.livejournal.com]

I think it's worse than post hoc ergo propter hoc - I think it's the belief that if something couldn't be empirically observed or proven because there was no way to observe or prove it, than it wasn't there.

It's like arguing that there were no bacteria until the invention of the microscope, and then blaming all human illness on microscopes. The second part is the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy at work, but the first seems more like the theory of spontaneous generation - barnacle geese come from barnacles, mice come from rags, maggots come from meat, and germs come from lenses.

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Faith's mother is Rh-, Danny is Rh+, and there was intermingling of blood during her birth.

Do not even get me started on people who don't seem to understand how many lives were saved and prolonged when humans understood that canning food killed microbes which caused deadly foodborn diseases. Or who feed honey to babies because it's "healthier" than sugar. Gah. Or or or...

[kuangning]

... *jawdrops.*

Nothing about human idiocy should surprise me, but ... they feed honey to babies? Is there anybody left who doesn't know that that's bad, really?

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

So what if you're banned? What you said needs to be said. And any community that would ban you for saying it isn't a community you should bother with.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I did post a response, with all the sarcasm and rantiness stripped out. So far no one has said anything about it.

[erbie.livejournal.com]

Post the link. I'll go get banned. Maybe it will save a baby's life.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to agree with you.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

The distrust of modern medicine is bizarre. And the willful ignorance is disappointing, to say the least.

[ahforgetit.livejournal.com]

Both my sisters were damaged by Rh problems, after people knew what it was but before they knew what to do about it, and my brother is perfectly healthy only because of heroic interventions before and after he was born. I agree with you that this was only not an issue because nobody knew what was killing their babies.

What to do about it is up to you, but stupidity like that has victims.

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'm an only child for the same reason. Multiple miscarriages and stillbirths before me, who was lucky enough to make it through with "only" weeks of jaundice. Then my little brother was born... and died on the table during the transfusions. In college I dated someone, the eldest of four, whose mother was in one of the first clinical trials. My little brother would have been only a month younger. Talk about sweet with the bitter.

And I know there are people that willfully stupid out there, but *sigh*.

[ailbhe]

I do love you, sometimes.

(I also love my Rhogam, because, hey, look at my lovely babies!)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

If Rhogam didn't exist, Niblet would have a 5% risk of being stillborn or born gravely, probably terminally ill due to Rh incompatibility. Instead his risk is something like 1 in 1000.

Actually, wait: 5% is the risk for the second pregnancy. I would have had two opportunities for sensitization to Rh+ blood, and I'd bet that the likelihood of fetal-to-maternal blood transfer during my miscarriage and D&C was quite high. So Niblet's risk would've been much higher.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Somebody really, really needs to read up on the history of midwifery and obstetrics if she thinks interventions weren't performed ('Right, the baby's in the wrong position. Couldn't possibly use midwiferly skills to turn it, so let's just give up and let mother and child die slowly in horrible agony.')

Came across nutty theory once that endometriosis had only become an issue since the introduction of Evil Internal Sanitary Protection. A quick scan of Victorian medical textbooks indicated that doctors recognised the condition way back when most women were still using washable rags.

And don't get me started on the theory that, in Teh Past, All Women Were Pregnant Most Of The Time Between Menarche And Menopause.

Aaaaaargh.

[ailbhe]

Culpeper was quite clear on the subject of midwifery - avoid doctors, he said, and find a wise woman with clean hands. Well, maybe he didn't mention clean hands.

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

As you know, I'm a big homebirth & natural birth proponent... but man, oh man, SOMETIMES INTERVENTIONS ARE NECESSARY.

If it turns out I need Rhogam, I'm taking it. Not an issue.

I'm also vaccinating my kids! OH NOES!!!!

*sigh*

People are stupid sometimes.

N.

[cassandre.livejournal.com]

Oh god the stupid. (I'm RH negative.)

To borrow my husband's words when I first evoked the "to vax or not to vax" question: "Honey, we're basically Enlightenment people."

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

People have a tendency to resent what they know they depend on[1], especially when they know they have no alternative.

Only the most insanely rabid pregnant woman would *actually* refuse an intervention to save the life of her baby, in the same way that only the craziest of vegans would refuse cancer treatment because it had been tested on animals[2].

I suppose talking nonesense online about how malicious, incompetent and evil doctors are helps people square the cognitive dissonance or something.

***

[1] Another good example is Teh Govuhment and the piles and piles of dung heaped upon it in every online forum there is.

[2] Yes fewer people have been vaccinating their babies since the whole MMR scam broke, but the reality is that the *majority* of people still do do, and even those who refuse MMR usually opt for the 3 vaccine option. Plus of course the dangers of non-vaccination are nowhere near as immediate and tangible as a complicated breach birth or something.

[zeldajean.livejournal.com]

MMR Scam?

[pbrim.livejournal.com]

Oh for $Deity's sake! My grandmother said in her day they didn't name a baby until it was a year old because "there's no use in wasting a name on a baby that isn't going to stay" and often they had no idea why the baby didn't stay, it was just sickly. Her mother had 17 pregnancies, 14 births and 9 adult children. Do they think no babies died in the good old days? Read the old books like the Anne of Green Gables series. It's fiction, but look at what was considered "normal" -- Every family had at least one dead child and many had a mother lost in childbirth. Anne herself lost a child and was bedridden for a year after another birth.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I really hate when people say things like this, because I'd really love to go back in time and show them all incredible infant and maternal mortality rate that people lived with for the majority of human history until modern science came around. The reason people used to produce so many children is because they anticipated at least half of them dying, most as infants.

There were even some cultures that wouldn't name a child until it had actually lived for three days, because infant death was just a fact of life for them.

This isn't just scientific ignorance, but historical. As a historian, it bothers me that people are just this stupid about things.

Actually, instead of time travel have these nincompoops observe some of the places in Africa where women get little to no medical care during pregnancy and childbirth and how many of their children die from the complications. Or how many of the women suffer from complications themselves afterwards.

Also? The reason they have the privilege of getting to be so ignorant about the facts of life is because they live in a developed nation that has doctors and science available to them - the same doctors and science they seem to want to revile.

[naomikritzer]

The standard response to historical figures, or information on deaths in developing countries right now, is to insist that this is because of malnutrition, or (in the case of Africa) issues like FGM.

By the same token, when a woman tells a story about how medical interventions really WERE necessary for her, and saved the life of her or her baby, the response is that her problems must have been caused by unnecessary interventions before other interventions saved her.

[charlottezweb.livejournal.com]

Ah, smotheringmother.com. As much as I love parts of it and read it daily when pregnant, there are some f-ing crazy ppl on there. Luckily, they're easy to spot.

I've noticed that the Rh argument has been shot down in my due date club though-several ppl have g-mothers who they believe had an Rh problem and had a number of babies die, so there hasn't been much argument against it--although I have seen some (but the above post takes the cake, definitely).

I particularly enjoy the part where you can reply with a series of facts and helpful links and no one will engage...that's always fun. Just happened to me with a 'stranger danger" thread--facts? we don't need no stinking facts!

I was glad to find the "all children by c-section" thread where ppl can complain abt the holier than thou mdc attitude towards natural birth, although it's frustrating they won't make it a sub-forum.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I particularly enjoy the part where you can reply with a series of facts and helpful links and no one will engage...that's always fun.

That happened when I posted in my first-ever thread in the "lactivism" forum. Actually, shortly after I posted the thread was locked by the mods and hasn't been reopened - although that may not have been because of me. This is what I said:

I think there's also a fundamental misunderstanding about what it means for a risk factor to be correlated with a health outcome. It does NOT mean that the risk factor is the most important contributor to the health outcome. Look at the people on this thread posting that they've been told that breastfed babies simply won't have ear infections, or won't have them until after they've been weaned. BF/FF is *correlated* with the number of ear infections a child will have, but it is by no means the most significant contributor to ear infections - that's the shape of the Eustacian tubes, and whether they allow fluid to pool. Similarly, although FF is correlated with later obesity, the *greatest* predictor of obesity is genetics.

So probably in most cases you're not going to be able to perceive the health effects of BF vs. FF on an individual level, because the effect, while measurable and real, is overwhelmed by other things that contribute to health. It's only evident at the population level, where you can either control statistically for those other factors or you can assume that they're randomly distributed within the two groups.

Oooh, that mean and nasty science. Apparently it's only okay to talk about relative risks when you do it in a way that elevates AP and bashes "mainstream" practices.

Just happened to me with a 'stranger danger" thread--facts? we don't need no stinking facts!

Was that the one about how you should never let your kids have sleepovers because their friends' parents will totally molest them? Yeah. I tried to post in that one too, about risks to children actually being much lower than they were when we were kids. But it's like talking to a brick wall.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

That will get you banned? It seems pretty reasonable to me.

B

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Sheesh.

Rhogam is the reason I am not an only child.

This kind of stuff is why I don't do parenting forums. The useful information isn't worth the blood pressure increases.

[chomology.livejournal.com]

I dropped off that board a while back, and have felt about a billion times saner and more confident since. I'm also Rh- and thank God for those rhogam shots; turns out that I didn't need them, but that was just the luck of the draw. My mother tells me that my great aunt lost 8 children - can you imagine? because of what was later determined to be Rh incompatibility.

The thing is, with that crowd, that the ones who are really off the deep end about NO INTERVENTIONS EVAR! IT'S NOT MOTHER NATURE'S WAY! have never experienced the death of a child due to a lack of whatever intervention they're so militantly against. I hope they never do. I have, though, so yeah, bring on the quad screen, the ultrasounds, the rhogam - I'll trade "natural" for a healthy baby any day.

[zeldajean.livejournal.com]

I'd like to go "as natural as possible" but I'm realistic. It's highly unlikely I'll ever be able to *get* pregnant in the first place. Then there's the challenge if *staying* pregnant. Then the delivery. All if which will be affected by my other medical conditions.

While I'm all for minimal drugs/interventions, Um, hello, I'd really like to have a baby, and it's going to take at a minimum lots of medical monitoring to make that happen. Not to mention an whole freaking boatload of luck.

That's a long way of saying "I'm with ya on this one!"

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I hate this sort of thing.

Mother Nature is a right bitch. You don't know anybody who died of Rh incompatibility because they *died* and you didn't get to know them. You don't know what a polio epidemic is like because you grew up after vaccinations. Read the fricking history.