What: New York Times’ columnist Michelle Goldberg has the dark history of the people who sold women the “natural childbirth” movement.
Why it matters: “Amy Tuteur, a retired OB-GYN, former Harvard Medical School instructor and longtime foe of the natural-parenting movement, points out that Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician who coined the term ‘natural childbirth,’ was a eugenicist who believed that ‘primitive’ women didn’t experience pain in childbirth, unlike ‘over-civilized’ white women. He regarded women’s fear of labor as hysterical and wanted upper-middle-class white women to get over it so that they’d have more babies. …When Dr. William Sears developed his influential theories on attachment parenting — a philosophy that promotes near-constant baby-wearing and co-sleeping — he was an evangelical Christian who believed that God had ordained women’s submission to their husbands. Natural parenting has since been thoroughly secularized, but it still preaches something akin to spiritual transcendence through female sacrifice.”
Source: New York Times
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