The Radiant Mission
The Radiant Mission
129. Birth Autonomy & Medical Myths with Dr. Nathan Riley (Part 2)
Dr. Nathan Riley shares his perspective on the countercultural approach to birth, explaining why he left his hospital OBGYN career and now supports midwives and home birth instead of practicing within the medical system.
- Men in women's healthcare - examining whether male OBGYNs objectify women's bodies and how medical training teaches practitioners to view patients as objects rather than whole persons
- Questioning routine gynecological procedures like annual pap smears and HPV testing, suggesting many aren't evidence-based or necessary
- The rich history of childbirth and how it moved from women's domain to hospital settings through systematic elimination of traditional healing practices
- Dr. Riley's pivotal moment of deciding to leave hospital practice after witnessing staff focused on procedures rather than being present with a family experiencing infant death
- The increasing movement toward birth autonomy through free birth and home birth, which Dr. Riley describes as "a radical act of civil disobedience"
- How COVID created a paradigm shift, giving many people permission to question authority and say no to medical interventions they don't feel comfortable with
- The medical system operating exactly as designed - profiting when "women outsource their power" rather than trusting their bodies and intuition
Find Nathan on Instagram @nathanrileyobgyn and visit his website at bornfreemethod.com.
Join the conversation on Instagram @theradiantmission or Facebook at The Radiant Mission Podcast. To watch this episode, search for Rebecca Twomey on YouTube.
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The Welcome to the Radiant Mission Podcast. My name is Rebecca Toomey and we are on a mission to encourage and inspire you as you're navigating through your life and with your relationship with Christ. We have been in a series on being countercultural and, as listeners of this show know, we love talking about birth and God's design for birth and lately that has been a topic that is pretty countercultural birthing outside of the system. So last week we welcomed Dr Nathan Riley, who was a hospital OBGYN who left the system to support midwives and home birth. In our discussion last week we got into quite a few different topics. If you haven't tuned in for that episode, I highly encourage you to listen back on that one.
Speaker 1:Today we're going to be diving back into the conversation with Dr Riley and we're going to discuss men in the birth space, whether cervical exams are really necessary and more so. Let's jump right in. But I would love to also talk with you more about the male aspect of OBGYN slash. Now I know you're not doing this anymore, where you're practicing OBGYN like in a hospital system, right in the network, and I honestly have just tried not to think about it over the years.
Speaker 1:I did choose not to go to male OBGYNs when I was younger.
Speaker 1:I have been to five male OBGYNs in my life All of them have been in my 30s but I never thought of it. I just thought it was strange or weird and that was kind of just why I chose women instead of men. But until you and I were going to have this conversation was when I had to really think about it, and the way that I had to think about it was what if my husband was in medical school and said you know what, honey, I want to be an OBGYN? And I had to imagine him. And now, knowing what you know about that struggle in his life, what would that have been like for me to go through? To have a husband that is going into exam rooms examining women's vaginas, feeling for lumps in their breasts, like I? It would be very uncomfortable. But I would love to hear from you, you know, because it sounds like it's very medical. You know it's not something that is like that for you, but how do you feel about the rest of the colleagues in the industry?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think our conversation up to this point has made it unfortunately kind of clear that the way that Christianity treats this male-female separation there's an objectification of both partners. Unfortunately, you've actually sort of convinced me that that is actually what fosters that objectification is what is being reflected in the medical system. We have a very deeply rooted Protestant kind of history here in our country and Catholic and all the others and, um, I would you know it's hard to find a doctor who isn't, like you know, openly Christian. But I would say that they probably feel weirder about it that you know those who were Christian and they're doing this. They probably feel like I can't be a pervert because they've been shamed and they've been taught that there's this object-subject relationship. I don't think I have ever had a problem with that because I wasn't raised with an objectification of women with that because I was never, I wasn't raised with an objectification of women Interesting, interesting.
Speaker 2:So I'm not saying Christianity is bad, yeah. Yeah, let me give you an example of something that is a slightly different way of looking at the world. So the biology professor, she's a PhD, her name is Robin Wilkimer. She wrote a book called Grading Sweetgrass Very much to the books. Phd in botany, categorize, taxonify, we need to look at nature and tell a story about what these plants and trees do and how they're in. You know what they're in common?
Speaker 2:Well, she, on one side of her family she had Pottawatomie blood, so her great-grandmother or something was a Pottawatomie woman and she, her family, had sort of maintained some of this traditionally, but she wanted to go and learn this language. Now, this is a tribe of Native Americans, that indigenous peoples that were largely related to the region around New Hampshire, upstate New York, that type of area. And as she started learning the language she got very, very frustrated because the Potawatomi language does not have grammar reflective of our own syntax, so they don't have a subject-object relationship. So I see the tree in English, in Potawatomi it would be probably something. I don't speak Potawatomi, but from her book I gathered that it would be something like I see the beingness of a tree, meaning they didn't treat the trees as less than them. They didn't objectify them in the way that our English language does. And so that was a really, really hard pill for her to swallow as she was balancing this biological system, systematic approach of classifying through taxonomy what trees and plants and flowers and squirrels and whatever do, because she could no longer objectify them.
Speaker 2:So the way that we raise kids and the way that we, our worldview, is going to permeate every little thing that we do in the space. And if you're doing a breast exam and you're holding a breast and you're told that women's bodies are only for me if I'm married to them, I was never raised that a woman's body belongs to me, that it is my object to play with, that. It was there, based on some scripture, that that was for me to enjoy, it was for them to enjoy. And if I'm invited into that privileged space, like what an honor to be, you know, able to assist with childbirth. But there's no, there was never any confrontation with hey, don't make this sexual. It was like this is my job, this is what I do, um, and it's a lot less sexy being a gynecologist.
Speaker 2:I that's what.
Speaker 1:I, that was, that's what I've always said, like I, like I said I never even really thought about it this way until my husband is, like you know, knows I'm preparing for us to have this conversation and he's like, well, ask, ask more questions about you know, being a male in the space. But to me, I'm like I don't see anything sexy about a cervical check or a pap smear. I mean, it's traumatizing for the woman.
Speaker 2:Even a breast exam is not like I mean, I'm not sure what guy is. Like okay, you, an uncomfortable person is in these weird gown and I'm going to do a breast exam. Like oh yeah, I'm really, this is what I've been waiting for. Like it just sounds so crude. But it's also like I can't even relate to that really. And a lot of male doctors have made, have done some terrible things to women under anesthesia and everything else. So it happens, that's true. It's just hard for me to even relate to that. So I'm not saying, oh, come on, there's nothing sexy. Like obviously some people get off on this stuff. I, I wasn't raised like that, I just wasn't you know. So I don't know.
Speaker 1:And we can't really correlate it, because there isn't a medical position where a penis is getting examined annually, that they're like a woman doctor is going to come in and they're going to like touch it, stick stuff inside of it. There's nothing to really compare this to. You know, it's kind of it's a unique thing. Now, that being said, I think that the whole annual pap smear exam, I mean I would just question that whole thing. It doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman performing it that whole thing is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, since we haven't really talked much about this type of stuff fortunately for those of us who survived COVID it bought the silver lining was that allowed us to really see some of the systemic issues for what they are, and one of those issues is this whole debacle around. I'm not going to call it germ theory, because of course germ theory also implies that if I don't clean my instruments and before cutting into your belly, that there's no issue. So there is bacterial infection, there is that type of stuff, but this SARS-CoV-2 thing was. I think we're far enough out from that that we're not gonna get canceled for talking about this.
Speaker 1:But right off the bat.
Speaker 2:It was like I don't think people can really give a shit. Yeah, now they're more concerned about Southern California burning, so, which is where I did my training. By the way, we're going back next week, so this'll be very interesting, um is it still there?
Speaker 2:It's Palisades, is the Palisades fire is it's like 12,000 acres of burned or something it's. It's insane. There's not that much space there without houses. So we're going to end up there for a wedding and we're going to get to see our old, beloved stomping grounds. But anyways, fortunately I wasn't still in residency when this happened, because I don't know if I ever would have ended up being a real doctor after all of this. But fortunately it provided us a lot of time off work and a lot of time outside of the sort of confines of the billing and the coding and the administration. And we were pregnant, we had a baby before COVID and the whole thing really gave me pause around the story of vaccines and viruses and all this other stuff.
Speaker 2:Because when I was in the hospital, still working after the pandemic started, I was wearing an N95 and I was doing all the right things washing my clothes. When I got home I was doing all of that because it did seem scary, because I didn't know anything. But then when I was at work after a week or two, I started. I remember once I got hungry and I reached into my bag and I grabbed a handful of nuts and I put them in my mouth and I was chewing them up and I swallowed them and I was like, oh my God, and for a moment I actually thought to myself do I need to, like, put hand sanitizer in my mouth or something? Am I gonna? What is gonna happen? Um, and of course that's ridiculous, but at the time I actually the fact that I even thought about that I was like what am I? What am I doing? Like, what is all of this, you know, and I, I, I realized, like I hadn't washed my hands, the, the deadliest virus ever, is on my fingers. I must have eaten it. I'm probably going to get sick. And I never got sick. Of course I didn't. Um, and you know, fast forward. I also then got me thinking about the HPV vaccine, because I have two little girls now and they're going to be offered this at age nine. If I decline that, I'm going to look like a real heretic, which I already do, um, um. But you know, as you go deeper and deeper into this, what you find is, if we're talking about just human papillomavirus, which is what all of this, this pap smears and all this is is really meant to help us avoid, um, is that when you go into the literature and I'm doing a giant literature review now, actually, as we speak, and I'm back to like 1959, I think as far back as I've gone In order to isolate what we now call a virus.
Speaker 2:There was never any real great technique. So what they were doing is they were saying, okay, we think that this causes cancer, let's say, hpv causes cancer. So we're going to take warts from this mouse over here and we're going to take it up and chop it up and add a bunch of weird solutions and centrifuge it down, and then chop it up some more and add some more solutions, centrifuge it down, freeze it, warm it up, freeze it, add a whole bunch of other stuff and then we're going to implant it into the capsule of a mouse kidney. We're going to see if abnormal cells appear and in some of those samples a couple abnormal cells appear and they say look, there's a direct relationship between having the virus and having these several cells. But nobody ever actually identified the virus. It was just presumed that cancer can spread between the mice by transmitting, by transplanting this tissue.
Speaker 2:It must be a virus, and so the reason I'm saying this is it goes back to like questioning absolutely every dogmatic thing that was ever taught to, like questioning absolutely every dogmatic thing that I was ever taught, and I have yet to find where they actually did a technique where they took tissue that is presumably cervical cancer and they found something that is uniquely, a strip of nucleic acid called human papillomavirus 16 or 18. They haven't done that work and therefore any swab that is meant to find a piece of something that we haven't yet identified is not useful to me. That's the HPV test. Now, there can be abnormal cells, but let's get the virus thing out of this, because the virus thing which the story doesn't totally come together, and I'll tell you why but the virus thing then gives us the opportunity to make another vaccine that we're going to market to every young child, and that vaccine, the Gardasil, is the primary one used in the United States, if not the only one. Now there is an ongoing lawsuit in all 50 United States about this vaccine. If we're not willing to just say why is that, then we are stuck in the mud. And so for those out there who are asking me if I don't believe that HPV causes cervical cancer, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:I think HPV shows up at the scene, if it shows up at all. I don't even know really how we know what we're looking at, but the analogy I give people is whether, like, if it's not that, then what is it? I say I don't know, but I think that we've blown this thing out of proportion. And it would be very similar to you coming down on a spaceship from the mothership and going to LA and looking at all these fires and you see a bunch of firemen shooting, or men in whatever yellow suits, and men and women in yellow suits and helmets, and there's a Dalmatian on the truck and they've got these white fire hoses and they're spraying water onto all the fires. You might say, oh my, my gosh, every time I see a fire, I see these people spraying fire on the spraying water. The people on the in the trucks are starting the fires because you see them there and every every fire. You go back to the mothership and you're like, oh my god, earth is crazy. Well, that would make sense if you didn't have a greater understanding of the context.
Speaker 2:Hpv may be showing up on the scene if it's showing up at all, as a con, an inflammatory process. That's the fire. The fireman is the hpv. It's showing up there but it hasn't caused the fire and this is the reason I don't think we're actually doing a lot of good in the cervical cancer conversation. We haven't made any ground because we have the wrong story and it's built on a faulty foundation. So you don't need to go back and get it every year I mean especially every year. That's ridiculous, that's way old school. But even every three to five years, is it really helpful? I don't know if it is, and the Gardasil vaccine is definitely not a vaccine for my little girls to receive ever in their life.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Gardasil. Actually, my sister was vaccine injured by Gardasil.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, what happened? Tell me.
Speaker 1:She got Gardasil. I want to say it was maybe the second year that it was out. First year because we were teenagers or so. I think I was in college at the time and went to get her first dose, got the shot, stood up, started to walk to the waiting room and passed out completely. Just blacked out, hit the floor and the nurses kind of like drag her up and they're like, oh you're, you're afraid of needles. That's what they tell her.
Speaker 2:But she passed out. She had a fainting response.
Speaker 1:Because her response was fainting and she just wasn't didn't feel right after that. She has since suffered from some autoimmune disorders and things of that nature, and this isn't the first time that she's had an adverse reaction to a vaccine, which is why over time she and I have both become very much like what the heck is going on here. She had a very similar result from the chicken pox vaccine. Back in the day I had the chicken pox, my brother had it. This was late 80s, early 90s. Our mom's like take, take a bath together, drink after each other. Everybody's getting chicken pox and my sister didn't get it and my mom also never had the chicken pox. So there's this assumption that she must have natural immunity to the chicken pox. But then they come out with the vaccine for it and doctors every time. My mom's going, pushing it, pushing it, pushing it. And finally, when my sister was, this, one doctor just got her one day and said you know, she really needs to get this because if she gets the chickenpox as an adult she could lose her arm and they give her the chickenpox vaccine.
Speaker 1:A week later, at nine years old, she developed shingles in her armpit. Years old, she developed shingles in her armpit and she went on to have recurring instances of shingles her entire childhood, teenage years. I mean we're talking dozens and dozens of times. Anytime she would get stressed that was a trigger for her and that sucks. You know to be a little kid getting shingles. And then you try to tell, you try to tell a medical doctor when you go in to up their practice that you got shingles from the chickenpox vaccine. They'll tell you it's impossible, that's not it. Actually it's people that didn't get the vaccine that are going to get shingles in old age. I mean, it's. It's a battle to even have that conversation with a medical doctor.
Speaker 1:So I appreciate what you're sharing with the audience on HPV, because this is something that comes up a lot with my own personal circle. A friend recently said oh, I got to make my appointment to go to the OB. I said why I haven't been to an OB in five years? Why? Well, I need to get a pap smear and I'm like, why Again? Why? What are you looking for? What are you looking for?
Speaker 1:And then I've heard things about how our bodies respond and react to I don't know what the right word is that they respond to incidents or experiences that we don't like or that we don't want to happen to us. So say, you have a fear of going to the OBGYN. You don't, your body doesn't like that, you're opening your legs, they're going to stick this thing up there, that your cells can actually change. From that being mentally thinking ahead to that experience, and that some people that have abnormal cells it's actually from the whole rigmarole to begin with that you're planning in advance to go do this thing you don't want to do, that you have have a fear of. And then now here you are in that situation and then they get abnormal results. And then they come back again and then they're like oh, actually it was nothing yeah, what do you think the the fear is that drives people?
Speaker 2:so I'm asking um this actually is relating back to the woman who asked about the home birth what do you do in a real emergency? Why is what is she so afraid of?
Speaker 1:I mean, it's rhetorical she's afraid of somebody dying, right, she's I think that people in those situations and the same thing I'll use mammograms as an example like I don't get mammograms and I don't believe in them because I think that the mammogram technology itself creates problems, but it's my opinion and I think that we have been conditioned as a society. You know, figure it, find out what's wrong with you, and if you think about it, it's women. Women are targets in this, because you don't find men out here trying to go figure out if they have cancer. You know, when men go to the doctor is when they're dying, when they are on their last leg and they just can't take it anymore. And they're not even the ones that are choosing to do it. It's usually their wives dragging them, you know, to go get tested and they're like oh, he has stage four lung cancer, right, like men are not the ones typically that are proactively getting these kinds of scans and checks and things. I think that women have been targeted by pharmaceutical companies, by commercials, by, you know, media, that we need to be checking, we need to be looking, we need to be proactive.
Speaker 1:And then there's also this narrative around I see this in the birth space quite a bit about choosing and the choice of. If you had to choose between your life and the life of the baby, choose between your life and the life of the baby, which life would you choose? And then all these women going me I want my husband to choose me, because we have other kids that need to be taken care of, and it's that whole conversation is the one that's next and it's like what? What are we talking about here? Why is everyone so afraid of death? Why is everyone so afraid of getting cancer that they're going to go do a procedure that could give you cancer, to find out if you have cancer. What are we doing?
Speaker 1:But I do think that it is a manipulation of media and of these pharmaceutical companies, and it's all profit driven. And that's why I honestly have this just gut feeling that there are dark forces that are influencing this. And that's not to say that the people that are on the other end of it say doctors, nurses, people making pharmaceutical drugs, any of that. That's not to say that they, as individuals, are like dr evil, you know, or like that rat from whatever animaniacs it's like I'm gonna create this master plan to kill everyone.
Speaker 1:I, that's not what I'm saying, but I think that there are influences that can build and build and build and build. And this goes back to what we were talking about an hour ago, which was we used to heal our bodies holistically and we used to heal them with herbs and plants and stuff, and now we don't. It has just been a cultural shift and a cultural progression. Babies used to be born at home and now they're born where sick people go to die.
Speaker 2:Do you know the history of childbirth being moved into the hospital?
Speaker 1:I have studied some of it, but I'd love for you to share more on that with this audience from your perspective as someone who studied it from your perspective as someone who studied it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's actually a pretty sad history. So what you're describing, this is such an interesting part of history. Like time in history which you said, you know we used to heal one another with herbs and naturally in this and that. Well, during the dark middle ages this is before we really understood the human body and whatnot Women, of course, were still having babies and the women who had had babies and had maybe been to some births were the ones attending to other women having babies, and they weren't even necessarily called midwives, they were just women tended to be the healers in the community, intended to be the healers in the community.
Speaker 2:And you know, around the 13th, 14th century you know you've heard about the witch trials across Europe and this was an initiative by the church, supported by the state and self-proclaimed doctors, before there was even the profession of medicine and what you're describing and all the healing remedies and having a home birth and all that.
Speaker 2:That was all considered witchcraft.
Speaker 2:So the church itself is actually the one that wiped that out and, in combination with the state, they then, 200, 300 years later, with the big influx of dollars from the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, we were able to capitalize and monopolize childbirth and move it by gradually earning the public's trust, move it into the hospital environment, and anybody who is practicing outside of the modern medical construct was considered a buffoon, whereas 200 years prior they would have been burned.
Speaker 2:So what's very interesting to me is that and I feel like there's a movement within the Christian world back towards that even though that's actually what motivated childbirth to be wrested from the hands of women using herbs and natural remedies and holistic medicine, very much so in the early 20th century. Like, literally, that's what happened. If you're not using scalpels and pharmaceuticals, you're not doing medicine and you're going to be jailed for practicing medicine without a license. That's ultimately what happened, and it wasn't, you know, 50, 60 years ago that the chiropractors and Chinese medicine, you know, practitioners, weren't able to even be licensed. So so I'd be curious, like, how do you feel about that history?
Speaker 1:Because I feel like that's an unfortunately sad part of the history of Western medicine place, but I do see that there has been a perversion of the way that birth has been viewed, and this shifts to this medical model, and I'll just go ahead and say that I do see that there is a current disconnect right now I don't know how to phrase this.
Speaker 1:So, you know, I'm involved in all these birth communities, and some are extremely very Christian-based, biblical-based communities, and others are not. They're just whatever they. You know, whatever you are, whoever you are, whatever religion no religion. So I see both sides right, and I think that that is still going on today, in a sense that there are those that are on the extreme Christian, biblical side, and then there are those that are literally witches and they say I am a witch and I am witchy and I practice witchcraft, and I use witchy and I practice witchcraft and I use witchy modalities in my practice. There are both of those sides that still do exist today. So it is interesting that that is what kind of led to the fall of home birth in some ways. Now I will say, though, that I don't know, I wasn't there, but I know that this is all hearsay.
Speaker 2:Just to be clear.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying I'm smart, but I do know that in early America there were still midwives and there were home birth midwives and there were a lot of midwives that were slaves and the women that were delivering the babies of these people that owned slaves were people that were owned by slave owners and they had knowledge that was passed down for generations and generations, that they were passing down to their generations and that in early America, especially in the South, there were a couple of midwives I can't I wish I remembered her name off the top of my head. I think her name was Hattie or something like that there was a midwife before you know, right at the turn of the century last century wife before right at the turn of the century last century, who was attending and just had these incredible statistics when it came to babies being born. They didn't end up being born in a hospital and I believe this was in Alabama, because they banned home birth in Alabama and made it to where you had to go, to a hospital to give birth. So I think that part of it is parsing out like I do agree that a lot of Christian denominations shoot themselves in the foot with a lot of things and decisions that they make they throw the baby out with the bathwater. So historically we can say that that's happened, but I also can see it happening now, and this is why I think we can really learn from any person anywhere.
Speaker 1:You can learn from someone, and just because you don't agree with them from a philosophical or theological perspective doesn't mean you can't learn from somebody, and if that was the case, then I would live in real isolation, right, I would live in this bubble, and I think that's why you want to have talks with more people that aren't in your direct sphere, that believe every single thing that you believe, because then you can't have a larger conversation, because you're just like talking to yourself, right, and I think it's important to have these conversations. And I'm in birth communities with women that consider themselves to be a witch, and that's not what I align with. But I'm curious about why and how did they get to where they are with the way that they practice and the things that they do. Is giving angelica or shepherd's purse after birth witchy, or are we using an herb that god created to potentially stop postpartum hemorrhage?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean I think, yeah, the million women who died as a consequence of using something as benign as that. I think they probably had that argument and maybe the reason that women use the term witch. Now, I don't think it's a great idea to use that term, because it wasn't a term that was taken away from them. It was actually a term given to them that was very, I mean, that led to their murder, that led to their murder, but but. But they might be using it as a, in the same way that people use a lot of terms just to like reclaim it for themselves, like, yeah, I'm a witch and I you're not going to burn my generation this time. We're going to go back to using herbs and we're going to go back to understanding our bodies. And it doesn't. It was the term which became anti. It doesn't, it was the term which became anti. It. It became um a confrontation to the church, because it was the church and and self-proclaimed you know um witch hunters using the malius maleficaris, I think, is what they called. It sounds like something from harry potter, but it was this the witch's hammer. They was the translation for that. And if you had a mole, if you had tinctures, if you had, whatever, you're getting burned in front of your family. I think that women nowadays, I think women are trying to reclaim that for themselves and yeah, that's all that I'll say. I just think that that's an important part of our history.
Speaker 2:And the midwives in the South, in the antebellum South, you're right, they were attending a lot of births and they really had no choice but to. But a lot of them brought those skills over and a lot of them also gave their bodies to the advent of gynecology. I don't know if you know that story, but J Marion Sims. He operated on women who were working for plantation owners and they had no real choice. There was no informed consent, there was no principles of bioethics back then, and they had so many children that they had developed, you know, fistulas, and Sims offered them a promising surgery but it never actually fixed anything. They had no anesthesia and these women gave their bodies, their lives, to this.
Speaker 2:This insane surgeon who just needed to make a name for himself, jane Marion Sims, is called the father of gynecology, and the women who should be named Betsy, named Betsy, lucy and Anarka. Those are the three that we know. At least we know the names of them. There is a movement now for them to be stated as the mothers of gynecology. So you know, we have this part of our history that is really really hard to accept, given that, especially in the antebellum South, there was a lot of Christianity Like how is this appropriate? How is this? You know a thing?
Speaker 1:So I think that the pushback on some of these motifs over the years, it doesn't necessarily need to be seen as, like women going against the Christian church, it's women reclaiming something for themselves, because women have just been objectified and brutalized by doctors. Oh, a hundred percent. I would argue that I think that the women in the Christian church need to wake up and see what's happening to them.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's my pitch to others. It's interesting that you say which is a derogatory term, and they're using a term that was given to them. I don't know why, but sometimes I feel like that about the term Christian, because it's such a big bucket. That could mean Catholic, it could mean any Protestant denomination and everyone is not necessarily in alignment in that. Early believers of Christ, those that followed him, the earliest believers, they were called the Way and sometimes they were called Nazarenes. But that's why you'll see and hear me oftentimes refer to myself as a believer, because I believe in Jesus Christ, I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, but it doesn't mean I necessarily, you know, it's not that I don't consider myself a Christian, I just think it's too big of a bucket, you know, because there's different. I don't know there's different, um, different flavors in there and I don't know different flavors in there and I don't know, not all, not everybody, is giving each other the best of look, of a look for what a believer should be these days. I guess let's just say it that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would love to talk a little bit about kind of going back to men in birth and just you know, kind of hear from you, because one question that got asked five or six different ways was what was you you, Nathan, personally, what was the thing that caused you to walk away from being a medical industrialized model OBGYN, and, by the way, you're real, but you did. You're like people always ask me this and the truth is I have small hands.
Speaker 2:You have those fake little hands.
Speaker 1:I was hysterically laughing so hard at that one, but I would love for you to share what was your walkaway moment. And then, where do you? Where have you gone from from there? You know, I'm did the little intro where I said you're working with midwives and sometimes attend birth, but what does that look like now and what does the future look like for you?
Speaker 2:The moment wouldn't have mattered, like there wouldn't have had to be a straw that broke the camel's back if the camel wasn't already carrying so much. So the training process I found very hard. I didn't not that I necessarily was worthy of respect or whatever, but I just felt like the whole process of medical training was like sucking up to the next person and trying to get a little leg up to get into the next layer of school. And there's a great book by Yvonne Illich. Well, let me go back to COVID for a second, because I'm going to talk about how terrible education is, and the reason I talk about that is that, well, the reason this feels so relevant to me now is because I have little kids and we're deciding what do we want them to do for school.
Speaker 2:And back during COVID, people like Gavin Newsom in California and a lot of other really outspoken governors they were all speaking about the need to open schools because kids are missing out on much needed education and this and that. And I actually fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective I actually was thinking, oh, this is so great. Kids are missing out on school. And the reason I say that is because I don't know if the way that we view schooling is actually the most healthy thing for children. I think putting kids in a five-by-five gridded room for 12 years their most impressionable five by five gridded room for 12 years their most impressionable creative years and compelling them to learn how to read, write and do math earlier than their peers. I don't know if that's necessarily the best way to raise kids. I will maybe have to eat my words in 20 years when my kids are like junkies or something like that, but I think my kids are going to probably be okay, even though we're very unlikely going to do the whole public school thing and my wife and I were both public school. We're not like these yuppie elitists.
Speaker 2:But the reason I'm so hard on the education system is that I was so bored throughout and the entire incentive structure was for me to do well in tests so that I could do more tests in the future. And I took so many of those Scantron tests in my life and had to do better than everybody else, only to find myself at the end of 14 years of school after high school 14 years of education, including residency and fellowship and all the rest to find myself in such a small niche of dual board, certified people, positions, that I had no friends and I very literally forsake, forsook any friendships or any extracurriculars. I had to focus and get to where I needed to go, climb the ladder, and when you find yourself in that space, it's like not only is it boring, but everybody thinks the same way you do, and that is just like. There's not a lot of creativity, there's no curiosity here. And why would there be? Because when I was six or seven, they were upset with me because I was wanting to play in the little girl's kitchen as opposed to building things like the other boys. I was going to go into school to be a physicist, by the way, and I decided to be a Spanish major. So like at no point in my entire time, from kindergarten through finishing fellowship and being absolutely done with school, did I ever find that it was like an easy relationship between me and the teacher.
Speaker 2:And if you compound that for you know whatever. I guess 20 years or 26 years. If you add all of my, you know K through 12 and then my 14 years of other school. By the time you're 26 years into that, you've developed this dance with the superiors that are giving you the tests and expecting you to answer these tests and you mastered how to read their mind. But there's no creativity, there's no real ability to be curious. But they couldn't knock me down a peg because I had all the answers to the test. So what do we do with this troublemaker who's not falling in line with the program when you get to the residency level? This is the cream of the crop. You've got into med school. Somehow. You got into residency. Somehow you got into fellowship, somehow You're finishing it off At the end of residency. I had just about had it. I don't want to say I was suicidal or anything, but I was like this is not a way to live, I can't live.
Speaker 2:And there was a baby that came in preterm, was born preterm, without a trachea, and the mother and father were holding the little girl as the little girl took her final breaths and died. And it was in that moment that I realized just how disoriented I was and how disillusioned and maybe even like a bait and switch had happened, Like I was watching the room. This little baby is dying in her mother's arms. The mother and father are naturally crying. They're devastated and everybody's doing something. They're all clicking on computers, they're opening doors, adjusting the blood pressure cuff, they're documenting on the computer, they're organizing surgical instruments, and the story with this was that the woman came in at 32 weeks. She was in preterm labor, her water's open, her baby came shortly thereafter and the baby didn't ever cry. So I'm helping her. She actually was hemorrhaging but I helped her out. Baby was whisked away to the operating room and there's all these surgeons pediatric surgeons and ENT surgeons and whatnot and they don't have a trachea, so there's no way of keeping this baby alive.
Speaker 2:Now what we all could have done was just pause and be still and be present and really in awe, like a baby came in and a baby went out, like a life is in and a life is out in the same hour. That's a pretty unique privilege, you know, going back to like you're being. You're between somebody's legs, you're being allowed to touch their body in a way that is not a part of your orientation to them. That's not my wife. This is a person who's here to have medical support or whatever Not that every woman in childbirth has medical needs, but this was an opportunity to be human, just like being in the birth experience. This is an extra important opportunity to be human and we all dropped the ball. Well, I mean, I didn't drop the ball. I was sitting there motionless and just watching. I was like I know there's nothing we can do. What are we all doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, why are we typing? Why are we moving?
Speaker 2:What do we have to do here Except to just be present? We could have all held hands and hummed. It would have been better if that woman had been received, and so that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, but I still wanted to be involved in childbirth, so, covid, well then, I went through fellowship and that was an end of life care, and I sat with a lot of death, which going back to the reason that so many people are afraid of death. It's actually not everybody who's afraid of what's going to happen in childbirth. It's the people that fear death and what's to come after that, not people like you who say we're all asleep. That's actually very beautiful, I mean, I can see that, I can paint that in my mind. My mind's eye is like a very beautiful outcome. There's a lot of people similar to me being told I'm going to burn in hell who are absolutely, utterly horrified by the idea of being dead, and so those types of people tend to be very educated, atheistic, sort of oriented people who left the church in scorning that past couldn't possibly fathom anything worse than death, and that's what I saw in that room as well. So, sitting with so much birth, so much death and knowing I wanted to stay in the birth space, we moved to Kentucky. I was recruited for an inpatient palliative care job. We moved to Kentucky for that.
Speaker 2:I'm on paternity leave and COVID happens, I decided I'm not going to continue with that hospital. I'll do hospice, got fired for taking off my mask and had a really big decision to make and this is, by the way, 95-year-old man dying of heart failure, hasn't had a face in his room, hasn't received physical touch for who knows how long and is dying and just wants to see my face. Like of course, I'm going to take my mask off. What can I do for you? Today? I made a cup of soup for him, I clipped his toenails, rubbed lotion on his hands and feet and I got fired because I, just like the little boy who didn't want to play with the boys' toys but wanted to play with the girls' toys, was just not willing to do what people expected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So that was ultimately the journey, and then I found my way into supporting midwives as being the way that I can continue to work in birth by taking my masculinity out of the equation completely in the birth space.
Speaker 1:Interesting, and so you pursued. Now you did perform C-sections, so you've been trained surgically.
Speaker 2:That's residency. Four years of 100-hour work doing surgery.
Speaker 1:How is that like to perform a C-section? What's that like?
Speaker 2:What's really, I think, important for people to remember is, in order to cut into Rebecca, let's say I have to not see Rebecca. I can't say, okay, I'm going to cut into Rebecca, I have to see no part of Rebecca. I have to completely objectify Rebecca and I have this much of a window in a sterile drape that is pink colored, kind of like your belly, and that's what I'm going to be cutting into and then rummaging around in there trying to find a baby. So, uh, surgery itself, uh and that's 70 of our training is not just c-sections. It's actually minimal c-sections. It's a lot of other surgeries like pelvic surgery and hysterectomies and all of that.
Speaker 2:But the c-sections you, you know you're doing several hundred of them, maybe 500 or so in residency, and you get so good at it that you can do it in like 30 minutes. But the whole thing is that you're deconditioned and reconditioned to believe it's just a little open window you're operating on. You're operating on this surgical window of tissue, of skin. You're not operating on a person with a name and a family and a history and a future, because if you do, you suddenly start fumbling, you start shaking and, uh, I wasn't a huge fan of being in the operating room to begin with, and even though I've got really, really good at C-section by finding some good mentors even after residency, to show me how to do it cleaner, faster, with less pain afterwards no opiates like, no oxycodone afterwards, like, people were pretty darn content after their surgeries and people don't believe this, but it's true.
Speaker 2:Um, I don't do them anymore, so I can't like walk you through it in the operating room down the street, but, uh, I could probably do it if I had to. You know, it's something you do so often, and the reason I didn't like it is because it felt so the opposite of human. It required me to see this as an object, a meat suit on the table, and I don't like the idea of being buried in a lead line casket any more than I like being thought about being put into a coma under anesthesia and having a bunch of people grope and touch me, even if it is, you know, for my benefit. It just felt very natural and inhuman. But that's also why surgeons are able to operate. They become so conditioned to see it as an object that they're able to do their job, and so I'm not discrediting surgeons.
Speaker 1:It just wasn't for me to do their job, and so I'm not discrediting surgeons, it just wasn't for me. It's interesting and the timeline of things is interesting too, because you had mentioned, you know, your ties to LA and stuff. My sister had two C-sections in LA and this it sounds like it was after she had her kids, but one of them she had in a teaching hospital and it was by residents and folks that were learning, and one of her most traumatic experiences with that I'm not laughing because it's funny but one of her most traumatic pieces to that C-section, one of her most traumatic pieces to that C-section was being objectified and she's like I don't even know who delivered my baby. They just came in, everyone had stuff on, masks, all their gear and they came in and they performed this activity and then they left and there wasn't a person-to-person aspect to it. When they went to go sew her back up I don't know the name of um, you know whoever was over this resident, but they said to I'm assuming the resident, whatever you call the student, have you ever sewn human skin before out loud? You know my sister's laying there. She's a person laying there that just had her baby removed from her body, and so think about it from that perspective too. It's like the surgeon is taught to not objectify, you know, to treat the person as not a person, but as this surgical, you know thing that's in front of them. And then to the person on the other side of that tarp or drape or whatever you call it, they're like I'm real, I'm a person back here, I'm, you know, being held down like this, drugged up, so much so that I can't move. And the words that they say are have you ever sewn human skin before? And the resident or student, whatever you want to call them, said a few times Imagine being that woman, being my sister.
Speaker 1:And the thing that was especially heartbreaking and hard in her situation is that she had a C-section for her first because the baby was breached and because in California they tell you can't deliver a breached baby, whatever. So the next time around she just is like I'm just going to get a repeat C-section. And that baby was also breached. And she specifically sought out this one lady, this one doctor who's like the specialty, specialty of C-sections. And then, when the day came of her scheduled C-section, not only was the lady not there, but the other staff member said oh, why would she be here? She doesn't do this anymore. So she went through care for her whole pregnancy and this woman never told her I'm not actually going to be the one that's doing this, and her whole thing was well, she's going to perform this, do a gentle C-section, and it's going to go great and they're going to sew me perfectly and recovery is going to be great. Yeah, and then it was students, and so that's.
Speaker 1:I think something that is never, at least for me, wasn't talked about before I went into my first birth was the importance of understanding the experience you're about to have as you're going into birth, and that you may experience things that your body feels or experiences as trauma or as traumatic or even as sexually traumatic.
Speaker 1:I had a female OBGYN that did my C-section and I still had a very visceral reaction to the way she kept sticking her hand in there and scooping her hand around my baby's head. That was something that was traumatic to think about for a period of time. I eventually just had to let it go, because she was doing her job and what she thought she needed to do, how she was trained. She wasn't specifically trying to ruin my life, right, or like create an experience for me that made me feel the way that I was, the way that I felt afterwards, but I think that that's kind of. You know, an argument here that we could create against babies being born in hospitals is they are. You know, medical professionals are being taught to not think about patients as people per se, because it's easier to do their jobs and do what they need to do. If it's a medical procedure I don't know, you tell me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I a lot of people say the uh, the medical system's broken. Um, the medical system is is working in top shape.
Speaker 2:It's exactly what it was functioning, functioning how it is meant to work, yeah, yeah yeah, it doesn't mean that it's the best for anything, that the problem is when we say it's it's not, it's not doing this, or that you have to check your premises. Uh, the medical system is a highly the maternity care system in particular is highly profitable and it's not because doctors choose to do the C-section, because they get paid to do more C-sections, it's because the system at large profits when women outsource their power, when women are not willing to say you know what, I think I can handle this, and if I need, you think I can handle this, and if I need you, I'll come and get you. We have led women to believe you know, I, I'm not exactly sure where this starts. I'm sure my little girls eventually will start asking me about where the, where babies come from and all of that. But, um, it starts by, you know, not even teaching women about what their periods are.
Speaker 2:I, I, I actually heard a another OBGYN on like Mark Hyman's podcast the other day and I shut it off immediately. I actually heard another OBGYN on Mark Hyman's podcast the other day and I shut it off immediately. I was like I can't further judge this person and I have no desire to listen to what they say, because they described the period as the cycle, meaning women are having 28 to, if they're not having a 28 to 32 day period. I'm like lady, that is not even the right terminology and I know she probably just made a mistake. Period is when you're bleeding. Cycle is day one of the day one of the next week. I said I understand that maybe it was just a mistake, but there are people that are out there seeking education because we should have given women this education when they were like 13, if they wanted it and if they're, you know, if that was a part of their family dynamic. There's a lot of families that would want that.
Speaker 2:But instead we scare people into not having sex, into not talking about sex, and whether or not they're Christian is not relevant. It's a matter of helping you. You know the individual like, understand why your body is changing and how you're feeling this time versus this time of that cycle, and all of that is like it's empowering to do that. But instead we say, oh, you're pesky period, let's just pop you on this synthetic, you know, analog of estrogen and progesterone, which is the pill, and you know when you're ready you'll come off of that. There's no long-term downside? Yeah, there is.
Speaker 2:We're screwing up so many young women by putting them on birth control, when we could have actually taught them how to know when they're entering their fertile window and they could have had some say over it, even if they were going to have premarital sex and be quote irresponsible. Fine, let them be irresponsible, but it also like they have the ability to know when they're actually able to get pregnant and not. There's women that are 40 and I'm teaching them fertility awareness methods so that they can try to finally get pregnant, because they had been on birth control for 25 years. The system profits. The maternity care system, ultimately, is so profitable because women have never been taught to trust their own intuition, to have any connection to anything greater than themselves and to outsource all decision-making to the person in the white coat and, as a consequence, the maternity units are far more profitable than any other unit in the hospital. The OBGYNs do not make as much as neurosurgeons, but they are probably the busiest people in the hospital. They're qualified to do virtually everything. They're a walking Swiss army knife of tricks and tools and skills, but one thing that they were never taught and they never will be taught, because it's not profitable. To have them doing this is to talk about how to keep yourself healthy and make yourself so self-oriented that you make the system completely obsolete. If every woman was like you and took your responsibility for your own health and really put your resources and your time and energy in order to making yourself as healthy as you possibly could be, and connecting to nature and connecting to God and all of those things are so relevant then they wouldn't be able to drive so much of our bank accounts into these CEO suites.
Speaker 2:So the reason I say all of that is that a lot of people like to blame doctors, but doctors are just a product of their education, and the education is a product of a system that is well-designed to keep you going back to them for more. And so one part of me thinks we need to build something new. That's where I've been for the past couple of years. The other side of me thinks unfortunately, I don't even know how we do this While we built this new thing.
Speaker 2:If we're going to build this new thing and just show how it can be done sort of on the side over here that's kind of what I'm doing we actually also need to burn the thing down Like the entire system needs to go away and we need to rebuild it in the way that the consumers desire it. But right now, the consumers meaning the people that are going to hospitals for care they are the ones that are perpetuating this machine. So until you're willing to say you know what, I'm not going to do, that I'm going to do this in a slightly different way and I'll come to you if there's an absolute catastrophe and I need emergency surgery or maybe an MRI or something. Without that, you're going there for every headache and every little broken or bruised arm and you're going there for every headache and every little broken or like bruised arm. And you're going there for every cough and every getting your face swabbed and you're doing you're just perpetuating the machine.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And um, and the system works perfectly. For that it's been designed since the early 20th century by the Rockefellers and Flexer and all that. That's another part of the history. Um, it was designed to do that. All that, that's another part of the history. It was designed to do that. We have all fallen prey. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:Is there even an opportunity to tear down the system? I mean, I don't have anything directly like right now. I could say that we're in a period where people are stepping away from the medical system and there's what we might call, in the birth community, sovereign midwives who are unlicensed midwives. They've trained themselves on midwifery but they're not licensed with the state, so they don't have to be dictated by the state. I have to drop this woman at 40 weeks, or 40 weeks or 42 weeks. You know I have to follow these protocols, I have to send her for these scans. X, y, Z. I've heard I don't know if this is true and I'm sure you would know more than I on this that this is a cycle that kind of keeps happening, where women will break, midwives will break free from licensure, but then, in order to serve more women, they get sucked back into licensure. You know the next, the next century, kind of thing. Do you know what I'm talking?
Speaker 2:about yeah, yeah, where do you live, rebecca? Tennessee I just realized how cool your last name is to me. Yeah, to me, to me, toomey Toomey. It's Irish. You live in Tennessee, so Tennessee is actually where I was going with this. I kind of figured you were in Tennessee. Are you in the Franklin area?
Speaker 1:No, I'm in Knoxville.
Speaker 2:East Tennessee. Oh, in Knoxville, okay, gotcha.
Speaker 1:So you know, west of you, far west in Summert, in summertime, is where a caravan of women traveling across the country settled and I'm a gaskin spot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my my professional partner, business partner, sarah, trained and apprenticed and worked her whole life there until recently, nice. And uh, sarah and I, you know we started this program and everything because we saw so eye to eye and the reason that she left that I won't speak for her, but I know this isn't a unique story to Sarah. What happened with the farm is that there was a bunch of very, very radical people traveling across the country in the 60s and in that epic it was like, hey, we're going to just make love and smoke weed and do drugs and travel in our caravan. And it was awesome. They were traveling with this UC Berkeley professor who's Ida Mae's future husband and people started getting pregnant. They were like we don't need them, man, let's just read some books and we'll learn this. And they did. They got very good at it, so much so that throughout the 90s and early 2000s, people were traveling from around the world to go to the farm to have their babies.
Speaker 2:But over time what happened was, first off, the first visionary. It's hard to keep that vision going and this was sort of like the resurgence of midwifery. They were learning from the traditional midwives and that's the diaspora from africa you described before. They were learning all this from them. And, uh, and the visionaries then had kids and those kids had kids, and you get one or two generations removed and you don't have the same like it's not the same rebellious nature. So ina may and her in her co, her cadre the reason that that story is so cool is because they did it out of a out of like a resentment for the system. It was the sixties. Like you can, we can imagine what that would be like, but I don't know if we'll have that necessarily in the same way in our lifetime. But they were doing it because it was a big middle, it was a way of saying F you to the man and they, by the way, had probably 50 to 100 acres of cannabis growing on their property in Summertown. They were out there doing it in the way that we can only dream of.
Speaker 2:But then you get older and you get more life experience and now you have a legacy you have to worry about and now you have to start. You kind of take your foot back away from the fire. You're like, well, we could just be comfortable here. And the final straw, I think for me with the farm and I still think it's a very rich history, it's a really, really great thing that happened with anime in the farm and and um, barbara and deborah and all the other midwives. They they're all just wonderful people, I'm sure. But what happened during COVID was that the farm and many other midwives and professional midwifery agencies and organizations were doing the same thing. Everybody else was. They were doing the compulsory swabs and they've got to get the vax and the booster and you've got to get all of them. You've got to get Moderna and J&J, you've got to get the vax and the booster, and you got to get all of them.
Speaker 2:You got to get moderna and j and j. You got to get them all like one ring to rule them all right. Um, you got to do it all, and that, to me, was the absolute opposite of the original farm, oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So now, now they they may not acknowledge that, but I happen to know that that is a big, big, big big. That was a big, big problem for a lot of people and honestly, I'm not going to, I'm not going to stir the pot here unnecessarily. You don't even have to say it about the farm. You know the big conferences, midwifery led conferences. It was very much an agenda that was in line with the narrative of the man. So no wonder so many people were like that. Or, pardon my French, uh forget that I'm not.
Speaker 2:I'm not doing it that way, like the farm is dead to me. There's a lot of people that really were resentful of that and of the, the a variety of midwifery-led organizations, because they caved to the pressures of a system when many women were inspired to go into this because of the midwives that were traveling with Ida Mae and so and that was. It draws out this like kind of hippie, vengeful, witchy you know they're using all this type of terminology and they hit a brick wall because it was like this is not what we were hoping for, this is not what we signed up for. We want to do this as a radical act of vengeance, maybe even for their own history of birth trauma against the medical system. And the way COVID was managed was definitely just right in alignment with this super profitable maternity care and women's health program that we have going on in the state. So whether or not we're headed back into another evolution of that I don't know, but we don't have that long of a history of midwifery in the United States, given our country's not that long of these traditional, which is a term, generally speaking, reserved for Black women in the South who learned this from their mother, who learned it from their mother, etc. Traditional midwifery reflects this African diaspora bringing these deeply rooted skills and ways of being with childbirth to the United States. That many women will go and try to find these few elders that are still doing it that way, but they are far and few between. They are getting to be very old, they're not necessarily all practicing anymore and that is effectively. I'm not going to say it's going to die off, because that's not for me to say, but that is something that has to be carried forth by somebody intentionally and that I think would help to create a resurgence of midwifery, which we might be starting to see a little bit of.
Speaker 2:The problem is all the medical, legal stuff and the defensive. Charting and all this other stuff still becomes a problem because midwives want to be seen as adequate by people like me. They want the system to see them as real professionals and that's where the licensure comes in. That's where the hey, let's just, let's find some licensure language that makes sense to all of us. Okay, we won't do VBAC. Yeah, let us have a license, but we won't do VBAC. We won't do breach, we won't do twins at home.
Speaker 2:Those concessions are not going to be a full evolution or a new epic. It's going to end up falling dead in the tracks because of those concessions. So in some ways people need to kind of stand up and have a little courage and go into the flames and not knowing if they're going to get out with their license intact or their ability to practice. And it would be a sure as heck bad PR story if a thousand midwives ended up in prison because they all just said screw it, we're not doing this with a license anymore. In prison because they all just said screw it, we're not doing this with a license anymore. That would be really interesting, but I don't know. If I had a crystal ball I would definitely whip it out and polish it up for you?
Speaker 1:That would be very interesting. I do want to say from my perspective of unintentionally free birthing intentionally free birthing because I um, I had a intentional free birth with my third a year and a half ago. She's 18 months and I had a wild pregnancy with her and I'm about to have my fourth child in 30 something weeks and I'm looking forward to this next birth too. I have found pockets of community of women that are doing similar things to me. I actually have a free birth with Jesus group. Shout out to those ladies because they're passing knowledge, you know, and it's the kind of group where we ask each other questions and you know what would you do in this scenario or what do you recommend for this? And I think it's kind of it's, it's a cool thing about technology. I think that technology can use be used for a lot of bad, but it can be used for a lot of good too, because how else would I have this type of community? There's nobody in my neighborhood, like literal neighborhood, that is doing this. You know what I mean. And then it's not the kind of thing that you can just like let's go go get together and sit around and talk about how we free birth our babies at home, but because of technology, we're able to connect. And then, you know, but because of technology, we're able to connect.
Speaker 1:And then there's also Facebook groups for assisted and unassisted birth, and I're scared, and they have to have a midwife and a doula and all these other people in order to feel safe, and they have to live five minutes away from hospital too, just in case. The starter pack, the starter pack, yeah, and then, after they do it once, they're like, oh, that was great, that was not what I thought it, you know, it wasn't as scary as I thought. And then maybe they might move to the next level, which is, you know, next time, maybe I, I just have a midwife, or maybe they start in a birthing center and then they go to home birth and I kind of I've I noticed that there can sometimes be a progression in how extreme or not extreme someone is birthing out of the system. But before any of that happens, there's still a lot of people that are in these groups that they want to do it. They want it so bad, they want a home birth, but they're too scared, they just they can't because they're too afraid of the what if they're too in their flesh, they're too afraid of.
Speaker 1:Well, if this happens to me, if I'm the 1%, I'd rather be in a hospital. So it's interesting to me, but I don't know. I just get this weird feeling that I think that the tides are changing. Maybe it's just because I've changed and I was not seeking this life, or I never thought that I would be having this conversation five years ago.
Speaker 2:I don't know if Rebecca would have been Rebecca 50 years ago. So I do think that we're seeing this circular, this sort of revolution, so to speak. Thank you, my wife just brought me up a glass of wine. Thank you, my wife just brought me up a glass of wine.
Speaker 2:She's like you've been here a while, it's five o'clock, it's time, yeah yeah, yeah, you know I um, if we look at like politics, actually it's a, it's really interesting to. I only get involved in politics when there's like a really crazy election happening, and, of course, this last one.
Speaker 1:What do you mean? What do you mean? Really crazy election. That's in all of them, in case you don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in case you don't know, Rebecca, there's a new president every four years and it's a circus every time.
Speaker 1:I hadn't noticed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, good for you. Kidding, I wish I couldn't have noticed. Yeah, um, uh, you know, uh, the that there was like these two parties, the blue and the red, and the red was very much, uh, you know, not really interested in a lot of the things that this new incoming administration is talking about. Let's say, like the make america health healthy again initiative, whether or not that actually comes to be or whatever. It's so interesting for so many people. A Democratic RFK Jr historically actually also a formerly Democratic Donald Trump Democrat are now coming in and there's this secretary, this cabinet member, rfk Jr, who's talking about vaccines and freedom and blah, blah, blah. And there's also the abortion thing.
Speaker 2:But if you can get past that, that is not this body of healthy stuff. It's not traditionally a part of the Republican platform. Actually, that was probably originally a little bit more on the Democratic side of like, hey, you know, taking care of yourself and the government's going to help, everybody can access to healthy food and the farmers are going to be happy and whatever. Like you know, when I was probably in college, that was sort of the feeling, and now there's been a shift. There's this sort of radical responsibility reflected in the Republican votership, or whatever it's called, which is actually really interesting to watch it from afar. Afar, because all of the health freedom stuff that came out of COVID that's largely been taken up by people who now, maybe previously, were progressive blue voters and now they're actually a little bit more aligned if not fully aligned with an oncoming administration that is fully Republican.
Speaker 2:The reason I bring this up is that one of the silver linings of COVID was being able, as I mentioned before, to see the system, I think, for what it is. It's fraught with some big errors, but also it was like a little permission slip for you and all of your neighbors to say, hey, we're going to start doing things differently in our house, starting with saying no to this vaccine. Now, that is not the first time that many people said no, but saying no to that was a big thing for a lot of people. It actually it was like a real. Even in my marriage, saying no to that vaccine was like going to put us maybe on the chopping block in some of our social networks. It was going to maybe lose some friends. But I had no. We were pregnant. I had no safety data Like it was being recommended by ACOG in June of 2020.
Speaker 1:You didn't want to become. You didn't want to become the study.
Speaker 2:I volunteered but they didn't want me. Yeah, I had tattoos. They were worried about my hepatitis or something. No, I'm teasing, no, we, no, it was just sort of like all of the things that I had described and observed. I was like honey. I'm not certain that this vaccine is going to save us from this. I know it seems scary, but let's just see how this goes and maybe when safety day comes out, we can revisit it.
Speaker 2:We got pregnant again and had a second baby and just stuck to our guns, but fortunately it wasn't like a damn the man, it was just like, hey, I just want to be the doctor for a moment and say we don't know, so why don't we just not get it and just try not to get COVID? And then it turned into like I don't think we're going to get COVID. Then it turned into oh my gosh, it looks like the vaccine might be harmful. And then it was like well, maybe this whole thing is just you know, maybe there's some some real you know something happening here, that's, you know, behind the scenes or whatever else, right? So so when we look at that for what it was that saying no to something that was being not only recommended, but it was actually being mandated. That was a moment where some people, especially young women and I'll tell you why I say especially young women it was maybe the first time that they ever said no to an f40 figure, and that's really, really critical, because I want my little girls to know that they can say no to anything and if no isn't respected, then you're going to put them in a choke, like a choke, or break their own. Um, now, I'm not like, I'm not this guy who's out there. I am not a person who likes guns or necessarily thinks everybody should be a ufc fighter and like be able to, like beat somebody up.
Speaker 2:However, I want my little girls to know that just because there's somebody in a white coat or whatever else does not mean that they get to violate you or enter your personal boundaries or disregard those personal boundaries without your explicit consent. And if that consent is violated, you have every right to defend yourself. Yeah, so why am I even talking about this? And it's because the having the home birth is a radical act of civil disobedience, and praise be that you had a free birth, because that is one step further. You've actually told me when you decide you're going to have a free birth. If I was going to have a birth, I would actually have a free birth. It's easier said than done, of course, but if I was going to have a baby, that would be the way, because I have heard so many great stories and some tragic stories about pre-birth where a person feels empowered, regardless of the outcome. That's key. Regardless of the outcome, they feel empowered for maybe the first time in their life that they got to decide for themselves what happened.
Speaker 2:And when people come back to you and this is for anybody listening and say, hey, but what if this and what if that? That's not relevant to a person who decides free birth. That's the point. They have wrestled with their own mortality, far more so than anybody, whether they're religious or not, far more so than most people have actually had to consider some of these things. What's your support like? What if the baby dies? What if you die? What if an emergency happens? We're going to have to see, like that is a leap of faith and damn it if that's not.
Speaker 2:Like the most talk about awe. That is awe inspiring, because there is a lot that can go wrong and there are absolutely no guarantees. Nor are you entitled to having a living baby after you get a positive pregnancy test? Yep, it's how we as a community respond to that unknown, that ineffable.
Speaker 2:What if that is the human experience embodied in a very, very short, flash decision that you had to make? I, I'm going to do this alone. I mean, god, it gives me chills just thinking about it. But had you been alive 50 years ago, that would have been a much harder decision to make. Instead, you had practice rounds and COVID gave us all the ultimate practice of saying no, thank you to authority. And ultimately, what we have to do in order to tear the system down, which I think we can do, going back to a past question of yours, is we have to become so confident in who we are and what we stand for that there is no means by which somebody can get you to consent to something that you don't ultimately feel intuitively is the right thing for you. But that is a practice, that is something that we are all working through, and maybe that is a part of a new epic, a new revolution.
Speaker 1:That's a good point, and I think conditioning goes a lot into that and us just making the choice to recognize that we've been programmed or conditioned to think a certain way. As you are hearing, nathan and I are continuing to have some great conversation about birth and about the medical system and women's bodies and so forth, and there is yet still more to come. So be sure to stay tuned for our third and final episode with Dr Riley. Thank you for tuning in and for being on this journey with us. To find Nathan on Instagram, you can find him at Nathan Riley OBGYN and you can also find him on his website at bornfreemethodcom. If you found this episode interesting, please be sure to share it with a friend. Join the conversation on Instagram at the radiant mission or Facebook at the radiant mission podcast. If you prefer watching instead of listening, check out the video version on YouTube by searching for my name, rebecca Toomey. And if you would like to help keep the Radiant Mission podcast going, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. Your support, starting at just three bucks a month, will help to cover production costs and allow us to continue spreading biblical truth. You can find the link for the Radiant Mission supporter page in our show notes at theradiantmissioncom forward slash blog, if you look for this episode or just go to the website and, of course, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. This helps more people find this podcast and these conversations will find this podcast and these conversations Today.
Speaker 1:We are going to close with 1 Corinthians 6, verses 19 through 20. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who's in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You are bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. We're wishing you a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. We're wishing you a radiant week and we'll see you next time. Bye, everyone.
