The Radiant Mission
The Radiant Mission
130. RhoGAM, Birth Choices, and Women's Health with Dr. Nathan Riley
What happens when a hospital OBGYN walks away from the system to support midwives and home birth? Dr. Nathan Riley returns for the final episode in our countercultural birth series to answer followers' questions and dive deeper into controversial topics that most medical professionals won't touch.
We examine the science behind RhoGAM shots given to Rh-negative mothers, revealing shocking truths about its testing history and actual necessity. Dr. Riley explains how most women's health interventions were primarily tested on male subjects, creating a fundamental disconnect between medical recommendations and female physiology. This medical bias extends throughout healthcare, where women's monthly hormonal fluctuations make them "poor test subjects" compared to young, healthy men.
The conversation takes an unexpected turn when discussing men's fears about birth. Dr. Riley shares a powerful exercise for partners anxious about home birth - asking their own mothers to recall not just the difficulty of labor but the transformative moment of holding their baby. This simple practice helps heal generational fears and creates a foundation for supporting a partner's birthing journey.
Throughout our discussion, Dr. Riley emphasizes the importance of informed choice. Whether choosing home birth, hospital birth, or something in between, what matters most is that families receive complete information without pressure or judgment. The medical system often fails women by substituting protocols for personalized care, but with the right information, women can reclaim their power and intuition.
Join us for this eye-opening finale that challenges conventional wisdom and invites you to question everything you've been told about birth, medical authority, and your own innate wisdom.
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The Hello and 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 for the last two weeks we have featured Dr Nathan Riley, a hospital OBGYN who left the system to support midwives and home birth. The system to support midwives and home birth. In our first episode together, which was episode 128, we discussed the spiritual significance of childbirth and its impact on parenting. We questioned the necessity of pharmaceutical interventions in maternity care and emphasized the importance of personal empowerment in making birth choices. And then last week, in episode 129, we discussed men in women's healthcare, questioned routine gynecological procedures like annual pap smears and HPV testing, discussed the very rich history of childbirth and Nathan's reasoning for leaving hospital practice. How COVID created a paradigm shift which gave many people permission to question authority and say no to medical interventions that they didn't feel comfortable with. And how the medical system operates exactly as designed, profiting when women outsource their power rather than trusting their bodies and intuition. This week, we are rounding out the conversation by touching on some of the questions that followers of the Radiant Mission asked, including a discussion surrounding RhoGAM and clinical studies, emergency scenarios during birth and more. So tune backwards if you missed the conversation up to now, to episodes 128 and 129. And if you're already caught up, we're going to jump right into this conversation with Dr Riley, because that's what it really comes down to is like you have to break down those mental barriers that say this is what everybody does and I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 1:Interestingly, my first birth was in December of 2019. So it was just a couple months before COVID happened. Now, had it been into COVID, I think the result would have been the same, you know. But it's interesting because I had my first and then COVID happened and then COVID was a ride, like you said. I mean it was. We didn't know what was going on. In the beginning, my husband was watching all these Chinese propaganda videos. In the beginning, you know, he went to the grocery store wearing all this crazy stuff.
Speaker 2:didn't know yeah, you know, we don't know. It's like humvees, we don't know. Yeah, it's like what the heck?
Speaker 1:it was crazy in the beginning, but we also saw something early on from katherine austin fitz, which was she. She has the solari report and, yeah, she had made this video and it didn't have anything to do with covid. But it was kind of like she's been awake to this stuff for far longer than we had been and it opened up a lot of things. But I do think that you're right that that covid helped to open up a lot of people's minds and brains to what's behind the curtain. Now, the political side of things I can't even have this, I can't even have a political conversation because I think the whole thing is such a joke, um, but but it's hilarious. It's hilarious to me that first of all, the side, the blue and the red have swapped so many times, you know, have like changed and morphed, and then people will be like back in. You know, 100 years ago democrats were actually republicans and republicans were democrats and it's like, yeah, it's still going on today.
Speaker 1:I can't help, but I just I don't have any trust for any of it. I have zero trust in any of these people. The trust has been broken, let's say, because let's take the red, for example, and the last time. The red that is now going to be president was red. He was Warp Speed was red, he was warp speed, he was Mr Warp Speed. Here you go, everybody, everybody, take it. I made this vaccine in two seconds. Take it. And now and now it's about RFK breaking down the, the breaking the system down, finally doing vaccine testing, and I don't buy it. I think everything is a test to see what people do, like we're rats in a cage and as we make moves based on how we're controlled by what the media puts out in front of us. It's, what was their response to that? All right, let's control them again with this information.
Speaker 2:It's what it is. It's a compliance test. Yeah, how far can we get Rebecca to budge this way with this tech tactic? Oh, she was going to go that far. Okay, that's the new normal, and we'll get her to go a little further, and we'll go a little further. And then suddenly you find you're in a completely different world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like the education system. You mentioned it earlier that the education system does not mean to actually promote creativity and to promote it's to create workers, to create employees that follow the rules and do things a certain way. Because if it was about creating good, happy, healthy human beings, then they would teach children how to do their taxes. They would teach children about how to write, you know, how to balance their checkbooks, how to save money, how a cycle works at the age appropriate as girls are getting like. It would be an actual class that is taught. I mean, I didn't learn about fertility awareness until I was 31 years old.
Speaker 2:Isn't that wild 31. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's ridiculous, like it's actually a joke, because I should have learned that as a teenager. And now, here I am, a geriatric, old, pregnant person. You know, if I was in the system, that's how it would be labeled, saying like girls, you got to really women. You've got to educate your teenage daughters on this stuff, because if you don't do it, no one is going to do this. No one is going to teach your daughter about their fertility no one. But our culture is so taboo about this and even in Christian communities it's like, well, I don't know how to talk to him about it or I don't know enough about it. It's sad because I didn't know about it until I was in my 30s. Now I'm talking to other 30-year-old women about it that they didn't know about it and we're all having to learn all this stuff. So then we can now pass it. We can pass it to the next generation, which is great, but so much of just the natural. You know how our bodies work. Stuff is completely lost. We are totally dependent. Like you said earlier, we're totally dependent as women on the medical system. They've won us. We're customers. We keep coming back. We have not taken on the authority or followed the intuition on our own, but I mean, we go to other people for questions on everything, though, even when we become mothers.
Speaker 1:Well, fevers I'm so scared that they have a fever, I've got to reduce it. I'm so scared that they have a fever, I've got to reduce it. For what? What are you reducing? What are you reducing? Are you reducing it because you were told to reduce the fever, because you want your kid to go back to school tomorrow? What is the reason behind and I used these words earlier suppression. It's all about suppressing everything. We've got to suppress. They have a sickness, suppress it. You have a period and it sucks, suppress it. Don't possibly look at what can help support your period. No, just get rid of it. It's all about convenience.
Speaker 1:But now see, now I'm starting to get into territory where you and I agree too much. I can't do that right.
Speaker 2:We had a good run.
Speaker 1:I agreed too much. I can't do that Right. We had a good run. We had a good run, we fought it. I fought as hard as I could, but yeah, go ahead. No, that's my window for a second. That was it.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, I mean I, I, I have. I didn't have anything more to add to that point.
Speaker 1:I don't want to. I know we've been talking for a long time. You have a family and I don't want to keep you just talking forever, but this has been great. I don't know I feel like it has been. It's been a very just, open conversation. That I don't think is had enough. But I also I don't want people on Instagram to be like he didn't ask me my question, so let me see.
Speaker 2:Well, go through, go through some of the rapid fire ones, maybe, just to make sure.
Speaker 1:So the ones that were from home birthers. I had a variety of questions that were all the same, but it was about talking about men practitioners in the birth space, and there is one thing that I want to say about men in the birth space. I, like I said, I went to five male OBGYNs in my life. Every experience was memorable, mostly because the first two were hilarious. They were like these guys from Long Island and I lived in Connecticut at the time, so they were just really funny to me. Another one stood out because so I had RhoGAMam during my first pregnancy. I'm negative blood type, my husband's positive, and I bought into the whole Rogam bit back then. And I say bought into because now I just I like unsubscribed. I've literally just made the decision that I unsubscribe from the narrative around blood stuff and that's my own personal choice and you know, if you want to question that, that's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so like because blood, because life is in blood, didn't you say that? Yes, I did, I did, yeah, which, by the way, like the Chinese medicine practitioners of 6,000 years ago, or something you know, chi like that blood is a living quality to blood. We'll talk about that next.
Speaker 1:I'll give you some yeah, that actually is what changed my Rogam, was what changed my perspective on blood, to be honest with you, because I had the first injection and I had a crazy reaction to it, but I didn't know it was from Rogam until I had the first injection, and I had a crazy reaction to it, but I didn't know it was from Rogam until I had the second injection. And then I had an anaphylactic reaction to Rogam and that's when I finally was like I got to what is this, what is this made out of? And went down that road. That comes from human plasma and it's pooled blood. It's a bunch of people's blood all mixed up together, and there is a spiritual aspect to that as well. And, like you know, you don't know what medications people are on. They cannot filter out diseases or you know anything like that. So you don't know what you're getting. You're getting anything. And because my body had the reaction that it did, I have to tell you it was creepy. So the first one, I had this injection and then, a couple of days later and again I didn't think anything of it, because we're not taught to question our reactions after we have shots or vaccines or injections or whatever the case might be, we're not taught to look for things.
Speaker 1:Later I started developing itchy hives in different places on my body and they would come and go, but they were so itchy I wanted to rip my skin off and I felt like it was something alive underneath my skin. I was looking up it's a scabies? Because it felt like a living something was alive underneath my skin and it was so painful and my OBGYN, who was a woman, was totally useless. She was like, have you taken an oatmeal bath? I'm like, lady, I'm telling you like this is bad. This is more than oatmeal bath bad. Like, yes, I have. And you know, oh, put cortisol cream on it and stuff. This is coming from the inside. Something inside of me is happening. It's not external, it's internal. And then you know I'm the one who asked her is it my bile?
Speaker 1:I'm doing the research to try to figure out what the problem could be, thinking maybe it's pups or whatever they call it, which now I think that pups is often a way that the medical system uses to diagnose people with skin conditions that they just don't understand. But that's opinion. And I literally paid for an ebook that this lady wrote. It was like three dollars and it was. She wrote it because it was how a remedy for pups.
Speaker 1:And the way that she wrote this it was like she understood that something was happening internally inside of her body and that you needed to clean your liver. Cleanse your liver because something is attacking your liver is used to process right. So I started taking high doses of dandelion root, like in capsule format, and then I basically was like no processed food, only clean, you know, vegetables, fruits, that kind of stuff. And within within a week my body started to clear up and then by two weeks I was all the way better and I continued to take dandelion root. My ob, when I told her about this, it was like she didn't even give two craps. She was just like great, good for you. And I'm like man, what a missed moment, like what a missed opportunity that you're not hearing that.
Speaker 1:Something that is attacking the inside of the body if you treat it, if you try to clear the blockage. That's happening, you know, because clearly I was having a histamine response and my liver couldn't process it. It couldn't clear it on its own. It needed assistance and I did take whatever it's called antihistamines. I did take Benadryl to try to. I took everything at this point and this was when I'm trying to avoid taking anything because I'm pregnant and I'm like I'll take the allergy pill whatever. I'll take the allergy pill whatever. After going through this experience and then kind of being like gaslit about it, and then I had the second dose when I had the baby. After I had this horrific C-section, they gave me the second one and I have the reaction again and I carry an EpiPen with me, actually because I have an allergy to red four, which is carmine, which is made out of crushed beetles not red 40.
Speaker 1:Red four carmine, yes, which that's a whole other side story. That took forever to figure out. That I had to figure out on my own because the allergist couldn't figure it out. But there are these little bugs and they release this red poison and we use them for red coloring in cosmetics and food products in America because we're really smart and a lot of people are allergic to it because it's a poison at high levels. So, anyway, I have this reaction. They have to use my own Epii pen on me because they're like it's gonna take us too long to get one, we'll just use yours. And then they're like what did you eat? What did you? What did you do? Why did you have this reaction? And I'm just like I, I don't know. You guys gave me a rogam shot an hour ago, 40 minutes ago, whatever it was. So in the end they're finally like I guess, I guess it could be from that, I guess.
Speaker 1:so, going into that, my next birth I mentioned to you. I went to an ob-gyn and it was a male ob and then he had another male partner OB. So I saw this other guy the second visit and he walks into the room and he like has my chart and he goes oh, you have bad juju. He walks into the room. I'd never met this man before and that's what he says to me. I'm like, excuse me, and he's like you had an allergic reaction to Rogam. I've never heard of that. And I'm like, okay, well, it happened. And then he's like okay, so we're going to have to figure out how we're going to manage this if you can't get a Rogam shot. And I'm like there's nothing to manage, I'm just not going to get another one. He's like, yeah, well, you know, could be a big problem, could be a big problem.
Speaker 2:And I'm like what did he tell you about the risk if you didn't do it?
Speaker 1:This guy knew nothing, and the more I pressed, the harder it got for him to answer. I kind of wish my husband was here to tell.
Speaker 2:hang on. Hang on, Because he was hilarious. This is a doctor, he knows a lot of people. What did he tell you? What did he choose to tell you?
Speaker 1:This is an. Yes, you're right, this is an OBGYN who says, because I'm like, okay, well, what is? Maybe we could? We could maybe maybe tell if your baby has a problem in utero. I heard that the skin looks kind of weird. I'm like, what do you mean? The skin looks weird, like, yeah, you know, if you get sensitized and you pass it to your baby, their skin will look kind of weird. So we could probably tell there's a problem, but I don't know, I've never actually like after they were born no, he meant like from an ultrasound oh well, I don't know what to say about any of that.
Speaker 1:Um he he was very it was very clear that from the interaction that I had with him that he's just a procedure guy. You know he does what he always does and this was the first time that he had had somebody come in that's like I'm not going to do this and he didn't know how to respond to that scenario. Now my former OB who convinced me to do RhoGAM, she had a longer speech about it, she had a longer explanation to sensitization and all that stuff. But this guy he was just very much like because I was asking him if I don't take this shot, if I don't get the RhoGAM shot again at 27 weeks, then what will happen? And he was like well, if there's a blood mixing, your baby could become sensitized. Mixing, you know your baby could become sensitized. But there was a big disconnect between you know there's this whole narrative in the RhoGAM sensitization, blood sensitization, sensitization, explanation about how it's not about the baby that's in your uterus, it's the next one, right Like it's not about the one that's there.
Speaker 2:Why don't we talk about this, yeah?
Speaker 1:let's talk about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the red blood cells like every cell in your body. They express proteins on the surface of the cell and some of those proteins are going to be considered native, like they're your own proteins. So you're generally unless you have an autoimmune condition, which is certainly something a lot of people deal with you're generally not going to have any problem. Your immune system is not going to have any problem with those proteins being around. So the red blood cells are circulating around and they're just waving at the immune cells like hey, ted, hey Larry, hey Georgia, you know, and they're having a good old time in there, good old time in there. But if there's a protein in there on one of those red blood cells that is looked at as like whoa, you don't belong here, sort of like Germany, everybody who was wearing one of those bad do those, like you know, arm sleeves, arm cuffs, like to mark you as Jewish, like you're going to be treated differently. So the immune system goes after this red blood cell that has a protein there that doesn't belong. That protein is called Rh factor in the context of what we're talking about, and the reason that it's circulating in mom's bloodstream is because the baby must have a different blood type, specifically an Rh positive blood type. So that's A positive, b positive, ab positive or O positive. You are Rh negative, so you have either A negative, b negative, ab negative or O negative. When you have a baby inside of you that is Rh negative like if you're A negative and your baby is A negative, there's going to be potentially some fetal blood cells that circulate in your system that are just passing through like they're nobody knows, no surveillance. Immune cells are going to be seeing that as a threat. But if you have a baby that has a rh factor on their blood cells, then those cells are going to start to be seen as a foreign invader, right, and the first thing the immune system does is try to destroy those blood cells in your circulation, which is fine because you don't need the baby's blood cells in your circulation.
Speaker 2:But then you also produce antibodies to it. So the way that baby's blood cells get into mom are through the birth experience, through miscarriage. Sometimes there's some other things where you get placenta needs to be scraped out or something postpartum or whatever. There are instances in which there can be sufficient circulation or mixing of blood between mom and baby that you would produce antibodies and the reason antibodies are relevant to this conversation is that the baby that helped to generate those antibodies is not in danger. But if you have another baby which is likely, if you have multiple kids and you have a husband that's Rh positive and you're Rh negative, you have another baby that's Rh positive and some of those cells do come into your circulation. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:If you have a baby that's Rh positive in the next pregnancy, after enough blood has passed into your circulation from your previous baby, who was also rh positive, then those antibodies can mount a very rapid response against the new baby that's growing in there with rh positive blood. And so what we generally see is that your baby's blood cells, the growing baby's blood cells, are all destroyed by your immune cells and so their blood gets super, super, super, uh, uh. It's, it's like. It's like not viscous, whatever. The opposite of that would be like like it, it, it. It's almost super liquefied in a way, because it doesn't have the viscosity that is provided is provided as a consequence of there being all these blood cells in there. So the baby will potentially in some cases pool fluid in different compartments in their body, which we call fetal hydrops, but the risk of that happening is around 10% to 15% if you never got Rogaine.
Speaker 2:There's a catch, though If you get the Rogam, presumably it drops it down to like one to 2%. This risk of alloimmunization, that process I just described the problem with RH right now in the people. Well, first off it could be whole blood. That's from a person who had the COVID vaccines and all that. That's one part of the conversation. The other consideration is we don't know how much Rogam to give to prevent that alloimmunization from happening. So we just say, hey, just take a whole, just take the whole slug, whole syringe of it. Nobody's actually looked at whether or not, like, maybe a little whiff of Rogam is sufficient at this part of their pregnancy. Or you know, you know you got to double that for postpartum. We just give you this big whomping dose, dose which could in a person like you.
Speaker 1:Could you explain what is in RhoGAM that would potentially prevent someone from having their immune systems these cells attacking? And one other question I have on top of that. And one other question I have on top of that when you do genetic testing and you know test for the gender of the baby, you're giving your own blood because the baby's blood is circulating in your blood system, in your blood and, to an effect, right. What's the difference between that baby's blood being in your blood and a traumatic blood mixing event that they're referring to when it comes to Rogram?
Speaker 2:So what you're asking is, when we do like a non-invasive prenatal screen and they want to look at the sex of the baby based on a blood draw like 11 weeks baby, based on a blood draw like 11 weeks, they can determine what the sex of the baby and a relative risk for things like trisomy 21 and whatnot. It's called the NIPT. It's not really a test, it's a screen, but it's super specific, super sensitive. It's almost as good as a test. What's the difference between doing that and this mixing of blood? Because if we have enough information to be able to probe, you get a blood draw from mom and determine the sex of the baby. Doesn't that mean that there's like blood cells circulating?
Speaker 2:No, because what that non-invasive prenatal screen is looking for is little tiny fragments of the baby's genetic makeup that do not correspond to what mom's genetic makeup is, and the only reason that I guess that they're able to tell that is that they're able to determine, like they're able to see that, okay, mom's whole red blood cell is here and we can dissolve that and we can see.
Speaker 2:Here's the genetic material, and then there's these little fragments that don't match up with that. So it must be fetal there is. So that's very different from whole blood cells from the baby circulating into your circulation, and those whole blood cells have proteins on the surface. Those proteins are what trigger an immune response. The little snippets of presumably little snippets of fetal DNA that are circulating through your system when we do the NIPT, that blood draw, those are not going to have those proteins that elicit an immune response. So it sounds like magic, and it kind of is, because frankly I'm not even sure exactly how that test is able to distinguish between mom and baby's blood type. But it does seem to have been validated and we do generally trust that result. But your next part of your question was the Rogan thing.
Speaker 2:What is in Rogan was the Rogan thing what is in Rogan? So let's say that you had an RH you're RH negative, which you are and you had a baby that was RH positive. And after that, yes, and after that you were found on a what we call type and screen. There's an indirect Coombs test which basically looks for antibodies to various things. It's called indirect because we're looking for antibodies against the antibodies that we're searching for. It's not relevant, but when we do a type in screen, what we're looking for is what is your blood type and do you have antibodies against any of those common proteins that are found on the surface of blood cells? If you were to go and get a type in screen when you get pregnant which you might in this pregnancy they'll do a type and they'll say what is your blood type. So let's say that on your type in screen they said ooh, you're positive for some RBC antibodies. Let's go and figure out what they are.
Speaker 2:They find that you actually have anti-RH or anti-D another word for it antibodies. That means that you've been alloimmunized. That means you have antibodies against RH factor, meaning if you have another baby inside of you that is RH positive, you could, in theory, mount an immune response through antibodies and destroy that baby's blood system or blood supply. Okay, we've established that part. So what is Rogam? Rogam is a product made by taking somebody like Rebecca's blood that has antibodies against Rogam and they are against RH factor and they probably do some magic with it. But then they inject that into a person who hasn't been alloimmunized.
Speaker 1:So it would be someone with negative blood type that has the antibodies against it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to prevent another woman from making antibodies against RH factor. So we give them whole blood from somebody that has already gone through this process and it serves the function, from what I understand, of basically blocking the new person's immune system from making that response. We don't want them to produce antibodies, we don't want them to even see this as a as a foreign invader. We're going to mask it and so that next person or you in in your pregnancy, if you get a shot before pregnant, before you give birth, and then a shot after you give birth, we drop that risk of that immune response and the antibody production. We mask that and prevent it for the next pregnancy by giving you those two shots. So that's what we hope to achieve with it.
Speaker 2:But we don't know the appropriate dose. We don't really know what's the minimum effective dose. That's where most of the controversy lies, and I have women who've had like seven babies. They're Rh negative but Rh positive babies and they haven't alloimmunized yet. So that's a pretty unlikely scenario and I do feel like that risk of 10 to 15% is probably an overestimate. It's probably way less than that and I don't think we fully appreciate why Sarah Whitcomb has a great book on RH. I think it's called like Anti-D. Yeah, yep, that explains some of this.
Speaker 1:I tried to get her on the show but she's like booked for three years. Yeah, it's pretty cool. What do you think about the fact that the initial RhoGAM trials for testing RhoGAM was on men and only men?
Speaker 2:Wait say that again, wait say that again.
Speaker 1:The testing that they did, the medical testing for the theory behind RhoGAM. It was performed on men, on male patients.
Speaker 2:It's never actually been studied on women because, first, they can't study things on pregnant women because it's considered unethical. Yeah, this is the answer to that is probably that to answer this you have to actually appreciate how is research conducted. And to do research you have to go and write a grant or write a grant proposal and get a bunch of money. But that grant proposal is going to say, hey, here's how we're going to do this study. And the reason that research is so cool and so hip in the academic world is that when you get giant papers published, especially if they change a person's clinical practice, it gives you a little bit of extra like trip spot when you're walking around like, oh, I got published in nature or whatever. So everybody wants to get published and they want to have a result that is really really statistically significant, meaning the result that we saw, or the effect of a drug or whatever else, was far stronger, it was a far more significant effect than you would expect by chance. So it's similar to saying like if you flipped a coin 10 times, you would expect it 50% of the times to be head, 50% of the times to be tails, but in this trial when I flipped a coin, it was 90% of the time heads and 10% of the time tails. That's statistically significant way, way more than we would expect by random chance.
Speaker 2:So in order to do a good study, which our gold standard is called a randomized controlled trial, you have to eliminate any possible confounder, meaning any attribute of your test subject or the test protocol that could potentially interfere with an un-medicated, so to speak, study.
Speaker 2:So what I mean by that is that if we were to study 100 people, we want them all to be roughly the same type of person, so that when we look at the effect of a drug or an intervention or whatever else that we can't say, well gosh, maybe it would have been different had maybe there's a difference between men and women.
Speaker 2:We don't have enough people now to do a sub-analysis. So what they try to do is they try to get a homogeneous group of people, meaning people that are almost identical in height, in weight, age, in race, in ethnicity, in socioeconomics, whatever. The problem with this is that the people that are most likely to volunteer for studies are young, healthy men, and the reason that young, healthy men are great test subjects is because they don't have menstrual cycles, so across, let's say, a 30-day menstrual cycle. You're going to have fluctuations in various hormones, various physiology, various biochemistry pathways, biochemical pathways. There is going to be a difference in how your gut works, how your brain works. Your whole nervous system operates differently in the follicular phase versus the luteal phase, so women are naturally poor test subjects in randomized control trials.
Speaker 2:So what that means you are far more complex than the physiology, at least as we know it, of men, and so what most studies look at are men of about the 25, 20 to 40 year old range. They're generally in good health and they're very often athletes, because athletes are very disciplined and they're very willing to do the thing the way the protocol was set out to do. So you're already biasing any result from most literature not all literature, but much of the literature that is in randomized control, trial format, double blind, placebo control, all of that that we all talk about as being really important. You're going to find it in a bias towards young, healthy men, because women are not good test subjects because they fluctuate on a month to month basis not even a month to month, a day to day basis throughout.
Speaker 1:Yeah, throughout the month, yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, so. So I presume, like with most research, that's what we're seeing with RhoGram. I actually didn't know that, but also I don't know if it necessarily would change my perspective on things.
Speaker 1:Sure, Cause it sounds like you're pretty used to that being the way that it's done. Yeah, exactly, it's like of course it is because we don't.
Speaker 2:We don't ever study women, especially pregnant women, in anything, so the data is usually very, very sparse and we try to draw, you know, really sweeping generalizations from those studies, and it doesn't always serve us well. Sometimes we're kind of stuck to doing that, like we have to do it that way, but it very, very rarely serves us super well that way, but it very, very rarely serves us super well.
Speaker 1:So question then the output of this is do you believe in Rogam or no?
Speaker 2:Should women be getting Rogam? I don't like using shoulds. I think that. I think. I mean I think that it's. I think people should not get the COVID vaccination or the booster. I think they should be completely withdrawn from the market.
Speaker 2:I can say that in good faith. I have seen a number of babies who have developed high traps, vitalis, which is the collection of fluid due to the loss of viscosity in their blood, collection of fluid in the baby's body and the baby dying. I have seen that it's not the worst thing I've ever seen. But when you've seen a lot of bad stuff, your practice tends to be altered by that. We know that actually through a variety of studies.
Speaker 2:What I will say is I am all for a person being fully informed around any risks or benefits or alternatives to any procedure, and that goes for induction. It goes for C-section. If you want to have like an elective C-section, go for it. Is that what I would do? No, is it? You know, would my wife and I get Rogam if either of us was RH negative? Or if my wife was RH negative? I should say no, probably not, because I think we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percentage, but do I think we shouldn't be offering it or talking about it? No, I had a midwife who used to work with me who said I said well, how did you talk to her about the vaccines? And she was like about hepatitis B. Let's say and she was like about hepatitis B. Let's say, oh, I don't talk to my clients about that because I don't believe in it. Well, like scientific inquiry or let's say, science itself is not a belief system. It's my job not to tell you how to think or how to be or how to live your life. It's my job as a doctor to give you the full complement of information in a respectful way, when you're not under duress with, like you know, in the middle of labor, so that you fully appreciate the pros and cons and alternatives, and then to support you in that position. And if I'm not comfortable with you, you doing X, y or Z, then it's my job to find somebody who might be more comfortable with that. That's it. So with Rogam, I do teach this in the Born Free Method.
Speaker 2:I will tell people, if it was me and my wife, we wouldn't get it. But if you're open to this and this is what you want to get, then I think it's a very reasonable thing to do. Do I think we should be giving the full dose? No. Do I think we're giving it to too many people? Yes. Do I think it's necessary? In every single situation when you're pregnant, rh negative, including a six-week blighted ovum miscarriage? No, no, there's almost zero chance of you alloimmunizing after a first trimester loss. But we love protocols. We love to just box it in and make it neat and tidy. If you're RH negative, you get the shot.
Speaker 1:I think there's always room for more conversation and nuance like them or the stance that their practitioner took was well, we don't know if that's the father and have pushed Rogan either way, regardless of whether there was a true potential. So I think in some cases it can be that. But I think what I hear you trying to or I hear not trying to, I hear you pressing into those listening today is or I hear it not trying to, I hear you pressing into those listening today is we all know the COVID shot's no good. We have no way of parsing that out from the potential of that mRNA being in the RhoGAM injection, because it's made from people's blood and if someone had that shot it could potentially be in rogan. I mean it's just the same as I hear and see women all the time asking for breast milk donations and yeah, like if you've had the jab, no thanks. So same kind of thing to consider.
Speaker 1:I mean I stand where I stand on it based on my own experience. It's like been been there, done that, had a bad reaction, no thanks, I opt out, I unsubscribe from this and you know I'm just going to, like everything else with autonomous birth and making these choices, leave it up to God. It's in his hands now. There's nothing I can do about it. You know, I didn't create my body. I didn't create my husband's. I mean, technically, my body is creating my children's bodies, but I'm not doing anything, it's doing it itself. Yeah, I know I've kept you on here for 100 hours now and I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.
Speaker 1:Let me run through this list real quick. You tell me if you want to answer anything or if you want to just jump off. That's fine. So from the home birthers should men practitioners really be in the birth space? What part of hospital birth made you walk away? And again, that was asked like 17 different ways. What would you tell current or new labor and delivery doctors? So that was from home birthers. From non-home birthers, is constant, excruciating pain when fully dilated, even between contractions, normal. I'm not a doctor, but that doesn't sound great. Use of tinctures waste of time or worth it? A lot seem to make them for reducing risk for postpartum hemorrhage. Do you screen the people you'll accept for home birth? Would you support a mono, mono twins for home birth? What about insurance? The midwives team I have, what's that Don't use?
Speaker 2:insurance. I don't accept insurance Momo twins. I would not do it at home. I mean, unless that person was like I would. I would rather you, I'm going to free birth. If you don't attend my birth, and I accept that there's risks, I just want somebody there. In case there's something that you can do to help, I would be willing to consider it. But Momo twins are generally not what I would do at home. Can?
Speaker 1:you explain why to people that don't know about twins Can?
Speaker 2:you explain why to people that don't know about twins. Yeah, so you know, if the twins are separated by dags, meaning either mo-di or di-di twins, then they are relatively separate, like their cords and everything are separate, mo-mo twins almost invariably. I don't think it's reasonable to even expect that they're not going to be tangled up completely, reasonable to even expect that they're not going to be tangled up completely. So one twin has the cord around the you know twin B's cord around their arm and twin B has twin A's cord around their neck. Like they just get tangled up inside there. It's like natural. Does that mean that Momo twins in never, ever, in any situation, could ever be born vaginally? I don't think so, but I'm sure that they have in the past. It just seems to me like sort of one of those like man, there's a great chance that we're going to need an operating room rapidly here.
Speaker 1:What would you think about or what would you say to a free birther who's never had an ultrasound? What if they have Momo twins in there?
Speaker 2:Well, you wouldn't know until they came out, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you wouldn't know. There's our proof of concept.
Speaker 2:It can happen, yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's see what other ones on here. I don't work with insurance.
Speaker 2:A lot of people ask that, yeah, I don't accept insurance. That's a whole separate three-hour conversation.
Speaker 1:I know, and most midwives don't, or home birth supporters, do all your co-pays and you have your monthly premium.
Speaker 2:Once you do all of that, the insurance company might start working it over, but even that is a negotiation with the hospital. The insurance company might start working it over, but even that is a negotiation with the hospital and you're going to end up paying way more if you're billing insurance than if you pay out of pocket, whether it's in or out of hospital. So we have a big problem in the health insurance scam. But I don't do it because I don't get paid to do a lot of the lifestyle intervention stuff that I do by the insurance companies. It's not billable. There's literally no way for me to get paid Like I'll get 20 bucks for doing a well woman visit and that's just not worth it to me because I'll spend sometimes three hours at a consult with people.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's definitely a whole conversation. Insurance in general the midwife team I have only delivers at the hospital. What questions can I ask about expectations? And then I'll just throw these other two out there and you can kind of circle to what you, what you want. How would you support a client with a history of shoulder dystocia and what is the plan if there is a true emergency? For example, I'm 45 minutes away from an ER.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's all the ones asked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not everybody, I think, needs to have a home birth. Um, you know, of all the things that we we train in uh like emergency wise in in the birth space, shoulder dystocia and uh hemorrhage are probably the two that we get the most practice with, because it also does happen more often than people like to believe. It's not like one of those phony things where people say this could happen, like like you could get penile cancer if you're not circumcised, like that's baloney. Um, but like stop. But shoulder dystocia, like that is not one of those like fairytale things. Like there's a lot of shoulder dystocia now, whether or not it's actually a true impacted shoulder, probably, that's probably relevant. There's probably very few actual true dystocia. But when it happens and the baby's bone is hitting into this pubic symphysis, that's like the pubic bone in the center you have to know what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Having said that, when a person says I have a history of a shoulder dystocia, that's where my mind goes, like was it really a shoulder dystocia? What had to happen for it to be resolved? Because if it was just like a pushing and then I got an all fours and it resolved to me not a real shoulder dystocia, but for those out there who weren't prompted to get on all fours when a shoulder dystocia was identified. That's, the first step is get on all fours. I wouldn't say that on my oral board exam, but that almost always relieved them. You know, because that's a midwifery movement, that's not what we talk about. I did that on my boards and I was like, well, if I was um, you know, I probably would get them on all fours. Oh yeah, but you're not practicing like a midwife. I was like, uh, okay, all right, let me think like a doctor now but that's the next answer.
Speaker 1:What's the real answer? Cut the baby out.
Speaker 2:No, no, there's things like you can deliver the posterior arm, you can do wood screw, ribbons, maneuvers, there's all these other different techniques you can use. But getting them on all fours changes the baby's relationship to the pelvis. It actually can sometimes open up the outlet of the pelvis. So, anyways, I would want to make sure for starters was it a true dystocia? And if so, are you willing to perhaps accept that that might happen and that there might be a real catastrophe that you can't get access to to help for immediately? And if not, then that home birth is just not a right idea. It's not my job to convince everybody to have a home birth. It's my job to say hey, the vast majority of women are probably close enough to a hospital first off and probably are healthy enough to expect that they can have a baby without any medical supervision whatsoever. And if they have a midwife and a doula there, that's probably sufficient. If you need a little extra help, there's a doctor available up the street, maybe, maybe in me or you just go to the hospital.
Speaker 2:So it's up to every single person to not be looking for somebody to convince them that a home birth is a good idea. If you feel called to have a home birth, that's probably the best place for you to have a baby. We haven't even talked about the nervous system and everything and how that all responds to where you know your birth environment, but that is actually an important factor. That all responds to where you know your birth environment, but that is actually an important factor. So, um, to that person asking that question, I say you know, if you're not feeling like called to have a home birth and don't like, that's okay. Nobody should nobody should correct you or or condemn you for having a hospital birth, that's okay. When you're in the hospital, that's where I think navigating that space is really, really. It's tricky, but it's very important that you practice saying no, thank you, but also really knowing what it is that you stand for, you and your partner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or perhaps repeating what they did in the last birth that released the shoulder, or studying different positions that they could get into to potentially, you know, because I think the thing that's hard for thinking about this space is when someone is says I really want a home birth, but I'm you know that this scenario and then going into the system it's not going to be the same. I mean, you can be as educated as you want and still, birth is not the time for you to be arguing with people first of all, or fighting with people, or having somebody that has to stand up for you.
Speaker 1:Like you said, the way that we go into birth. You were mentioning the nervous system and it's not exactly what I'm talking about, but at the same time, it is who is in our birth phase matters. And yeah, for example, when my midwife ended up backing out, I was like, well then she wasn't meant to be there. Yeah, you know, this is this, is everything's falling into place, because I wouldn't want someone who is afraid or has any fear or could have slight concern, to even be in that space, because then they bring that fear and that negative energy potentially into that space. You know, I'm planning this next baby and my mom always comes in.
Speaker 1:Actually, all the birth videos that you see on my page my mom took oh, cool, she's, she's been present, which is cool, so it's been my husband and then my mom um, you know, was there and she talked about my dad potentially coming this time around to just keep an eye on all the other kids and they were just here over the holidays and I was like dad, I hear you're, you know you might be coming. He's like, oh, am I getting volunteered for that? I don't want to be here for that I don't want to see any of this stuff. I'm like, well, you're not invited first of all to see any of this stuff, but would I even feel comfortable with him being in the house giving birth? Like that's something I have to think about as the one who's giving birth.
Speaker 1:It's like would I feel weird if, knowing that my dad is here, like if I feel like I'm going to scream or whatever I'm going to do, I'm going to. You know, I need to be able to feel comfortable doing that, and I've heard a lot of birth stories from women who have had people in their birth space that they shouldn't have, that they then later, you know, felt didn't feel completely comfortable and had a long, slow, drawn out birth, and I don't want that. So you know, it's something that I think that women need to consider. So, anyway, any other of these other questions you wanted to respond to, you don't have to, but just I don't I don't know if any of those jumped out to me.
Speaker 2:I mean the whole being a man in birth. I think that there's more to that question that we haven't really addressed, but, you know, at the end of the day, I think it probably is perceived by people that, like it's kind of a there's some sort of I don't know the like OBGYNs males are all perverts because they get to, like, see vulvas and stuff like I'm not sure what part of that is like driving the perverts to go to obgw, and I really don't know. I don't think that that's the situation. Um, what I will.
Speaker 2:I'll add to that, though, and say that, yeah, a lot of, I think, men have done really really horrible things to women over the years. We've talked about a number of them. But also, when you survey a population of people and you can, you can actually try this on your Instagram and tag me. I'm curious, but I've done this, and the question is, if you think back to the worst experience you had with an OB-GYN, were they male or female? It's a 50-50, you know, like like all the men are not the bad ones necessarily. I'm sure there's a lot of bad ones, but there's also a lot of women that are not being very kind to other women.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:Oh, I agree In my experience, it was like the majority of male of female OBGYNs were actually harsher against women than men were. Men were almost like I'm going to be very, very gentle, and the women were like, come on, you had a baby. It was like, ooh, that's not how I would treat my own wife and I hope you never get to touch my wife, because that was not very kind. Um, so I think that there's. I think that we have a medical system. There's a lot of people working within it that are I, I. It's a little sociopathic, like it's a little bit like they're the captain of the ship and they want you to know how smart they are. There's a lot of that. These are all good people that got into a space where now they feel like they, in order to they have a chip on their shoulder, in order to flex their intellectual status or something they need to show you just how smart they are. But ultimately, if you can appease to either a male or a female OBGYN, appease to them in the sense that you're like listen, I don't mean any disrespect, I really just want to have a conversation. I think most of them are actually going to be pretty open to conversation.
Speaker 2:They've become so we all doctors have become so conditioned to a person coming in wanting a silver bullet or a magical fix for something when it took 10 to 20 years maybe, to develop your problem. I don't have a magical cure. I don't have a holistic remedy for that thing. We have to actually develop a relationship and we have to go forward together and try some things and see where we can work.
Speaker 2:But if you're a consumer that's demanding a quick fix, whether it's in the form of an injectable pharmaceutical or a surgery, those OBGYNs realize that they can more easily cater to you, to those people. If you go in and you're like listen, I understand that there's a lot of good things out there. I want to have a conversation around this and not have pharmaceuticals and surgery. Is there anything you can do? And if they're like sorry, I didn't train to do that, that's okay. That's true, but at least you've had the conversation. This like mudslinging between midwives and doctors and doctors and patients and all this is just. It's too much for me, which is another reason why I'm so happy to be out of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what I hear you saying is that it because the medical complex is a business, in a sense it's. You're going to someone for a service, so tell them what you're looking for. They will tell you whether or not they're a fit for what it is that you're looking for. I mean, when it comes down to it, and if it's not a fit, then move on. I mean, that's kind of what a lot of women are, the situation that a lot of women are in now, and why they're seeking home births, and then you know, that's the thing that makes it tough, though, for a lot of women, especially in the area where I live. I've, you know, I know the midwives in my area and I personally, while I think that they're wonderful, beautiful people, are not a fit for me personally to attend my birth right, and that's okay and that's the place that I have to come to right.
Speaker 1:Um, how does your wife feel about you being in the, in this field and like all the birthy stuff? I mean? In some senses she's probably like this is great because she's you know.
Speaker 2:It sounds like you guys have had two babies in the last couple of years and you've been there to support her well, she's been with it through through thick and thin med school, residency, fellowship, and then even when I was still in the hospital. After all of that, uh, you know, one big thing for me was I need to get out of the way, because now I'm an expert in how to give birth and I'm always the guy that's like she's. She's Mexican, she's traveled. When I, when I met her in high school, we've been together since we were 16. And when we met and I was like, oh, I really want to learn Spanish, I went in and I learned Spanish and I made the mistake of correcting people's grammar, you know, and she's like, dude, I grew up speaking. That's like, let this be mine. You know, she did karate when she was little and then I got into competitive judo when I was college. It was almost like I was trying to be like her because I was like I had such an adoration for her and so this was like the story of her life.
Speaker 2:And then, when we got pregnant, I had determined that I'm going to take a step back and like let her be fully, the full. I'm not even the co-pilot, I'm like the flight attendant in the back, like you, do you? But I stepped back so far that she actually felt like I had, like we were not connected super well in our births, which is a regret that I have and then I will always will have. But there was a confrontation for me to be like man do I really believe this? Like I talk the talk, but can I walk the walk? We're going to have a.
Speaker 2:We had our first birth was in the hospital, but we went in at 10 centimeters and had a baby. The second one we did it at home because it was like dead center of the COVID stuff at the end of 2021. And we decided to have a midwife and everything. And it was like man, if I really believe this, I got it Like we're going to have to get through this, and it wasn't as hard as I'm making it sound. But there was a moment there where it was like what? Moment there where it was like home birth, what?
Speaker 2:if something doesn't go right and I had to just surrender to that, but we did and I was like, yeah, home birth, we had a home birth don't boast about it on instagram now.
Speaker 1:Um, so you were a little even you had that, that concern in your mind, which I think is very yeah, it's healthy, normal and human of us, right, right, especially after being in the system and experiencing things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you experience a lot of bad things Like that's what people don't appreciate about OBGYNs. They've seen some horrific stuff and they don't want that to happen again.
Speaker 1:And midwives. Even midwives too, and I think that that's something that can become tough is when they have experienced tough births long ones, or things where bad things happened, or still births or, whatever the case might be, transfers, that things weren't great. It shapes your experience and the way that you're going to react to things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it colors everything it does, it really does yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, things, yeah, it colors everything it does, it really does, yeah. Yeah, I've watched a couple. I've watched a one midwife in particular whose transfer rate has just like skyrocketed the last couple of years, and I think I obviously don't know all of the stories, but my assumption from the outside is, you know, she's seen some things and now she's erring on the side of caution. Yeah, yeah but I'm not.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's her, her, her deal, right yeah, well, yeah, and we actually have data that that does support this notion that doctors who have had bad outcomes tend to have like lower thresholds for intervention because they just can't. Our fear of mortality, like as a society, is reflected in doctors too. We don't want babies to die. It seems unfair that a baby would have to die, and in many regards it is, but it's also a part of the fabric of our mortality. Not every baby is going to make it through this.
Speaker 2:And that's a hard pill to swallow, but for a doctor they then carry that as like oh, had I done this thing differently Whether or not it's true that wouldn't have happened. And same with midwives. So we know that that colors their practice and maybe even over the long-term, modifies how they view informed consent, birth plans and whatever. So you have that first breach the baby dies or something. It may not even have been related to the breach, but it now gives you this impression that breach is super dangerous.
Speaker 2:Sure, I never really told you what my wife thought about all of this, but she never once thought that like oh, my husband's a gynecologist. She actually was always very proud of me and supportive, like. I don't think it ever occurred to her that that's like like, can you like? She's like he's not in there having sex with people. He's like doing his job, like and I don't even know if she had heard to her that it was like yeah, I guess that is kind of weird, until I started doing like hand gestures, like I'd be like I was doing an exam. She's like can you stop doing the hand gestures?
Speaker 1:She's like all right, this is getting weird now. Oh, I don. She's like all right, this is getting weird now. Oh, I don't know about this, I mean. But I even had to, kind of like I said I it's not something that I've thought about from that perspective either. Until you know, I have to have the you and I were preparing for this. I'm like I have to have the critical conversation. This is what people want to know people want to know.
Speaker 1:People want to know about this. There is a concern there, or not necessarily a concern, but I know that. You know women in the free birth community they don't they don't want anybody there, let alone a man. It's it's a totally different world, you know. It's a different bag altogether. But I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. I I hope that this wasn't too far off the path of what you were hoping for in the first half of your 2025 great actually.
Speaker 2:No, this is pretty great. You're the first one I've done and I thought I hope you're gonna release this whole thing, because it's been like what is it Four hours or something.
Speaker 1:I've been timing. We've got three, 43. Hey, and I started after, like the intro, so there was maybe another five minutes or so. So I'm going to break this up into multiple episodes. I mentioned Dr Stu to you before he was on the podcast Gosh. I think it was two years ago, two years ago.
Speaker 2:I looked it up. Actually I looked it up and I was like, ah, twice I doubled his time.
Speaker 1:And he did too. Yeah, he was here for a while and then he was like I gotta go, very abruptly, like I gotta go, I'm done, and I don't blame him. But you know he he was loving sharing all this stuff and he, you know, he really went into the whole medical system stuff. So it's good but anyway actually. So those episodes are some of the most listened to episodes of all time and so I have a feeling these are going to be too, because people want to hear, you know, especially women in the home birth space. They want to hear from folks that have like seen it, seen the real stuff, and then like now they're out, what was it like in there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's like it's like watching a car wreck, you know like it's like we all want to hate on the doctors but then whenever somebody steps out of bounds, you like, want to like get inside of them. I totally get that. I meet doctors like that and I'm like I want to know your story because every one of them worked very hard to get where they are, to make the decision, to make any decision that's going to take away or invalidate or some in some way that literally the journey you started when you were 18 pre-med student in college. I mean that is like we have to give people credit when they are like I'm not saying this to toot my horn, but stew was one of my mentors residency. Like dr stew, um bliss. His partner, like I, was at a birth throw and she was still apprenticing with him when I was in residency.
Speaker 2:Like, uh, when you meet these types of doctors, for me I want to get to know how they made such a radically unusual decision to break away from a career that had the potential to make you 40 years of decent income Not millions, but a decent income and have respect and prestige and awards and the white coat and all that I'm 40, so 40 this year. So like I have 20, 30 years more of doing this and it's exciting, but it's also like man. I can't imagine these people that are doing this for 24 years and then they step out like I want to get in, I want to go and give them a hug, like that's a really hard decision. So when you meet doctors that have made that hard decision, I hope we can all give them a little, a little grace until they cross us and then you can come down absolutely well.
Speaker 1:I give you tons of credit and you know, that's why I said this is going to be a tough one for me, because I feel that you really respect birth and you really respect the birth space and you respect home birthers and it sounds like free birthers too, that you're just like cool I respect women and and and fathers for for what this is so that actually for both of them that brings up a really good point, and I think this is something that you do in your class, in your born free method.
Speaker 1:I think it is where you're supporting, you know, both husband and wives, but I see a huge need for support with husbands when it comes to birth, I mean, obviously, with home birth. As a home birther, I see the need because I get so many women that are like my husband's not on board and I want to do a home birth, and then that conversation is always, you know, a deep one.
Speaker 2:I've got the prescription. Do you have it? I've got the prescription? Tell me, yeah, okay. So young men Got the prescription? Tell me, okay.
Speaker 2:So young men, going back to the witch hunts, there's this deeply like wounded masculine where we want to protect women, right, and it's sometimes it comes out in a very toxic way, a very like sort of controlling way. But when we were born little boys, we heard our birth story around the table, our moms telling our grandmothers and our aunts and whatever, and there's oftentimes a lot of language that's very negative around, how painful, how hard it was, which I'm sure. Of course it was painful, of course it was hard, but that's the language that we hear in relationship to when we were coming into the world and our mother going through terrible pain, maybe nearly dying, I was ripped open. Those types of language of little phrases they stick with us even before we can understand what they mean. So that, plus this cultural milieu of messaging that birth is unsafe and it's dangerous and something bad is about to happen at every moment, we men hold that within us and we then fall in love with a woman. Usually this is how it goes. We fall in love with a woman, usually we, we have a baby and yeah, and and this is certainly how it went for me and and then our partner is going to have a baby and we become afraid for them because we remember how harmful birth was to our mothers. And so we then become very protective of our partners because they're now the one that we're the most in love with. But we never forget harming and maybe even making our mothers feel like we almost killed them. And in some very rare instances we do kill them and on maybe an identity level, we did kill them and we know that our moms and our dads never were the same after our birth. And there's all this stuff, you know, and mom's body changed and all this stuff, all the stuff that we hear. Men are also hearing that. So what I have men do here's the prescription Um, cause the home birth then is like, absolutely, that sounds crazy, it's so unsafe, you're going to get, you're going to die, your head's going to pop up, you know, like all this crazy stuff's going to happen, everybody's going to die and everybody's just going to the house is just going to erupt in flames.
Speaker 2:Here's what I have men do, and it's sometimes helpful for their female partners to do this as well. Go to your mother and ask her to tell you the story of when you were born. And if you have a mother, you can do this. You can also ask your father. But ask them and they're going to tell you like, oh, it was so hard, johnny, I had you know. Ask them and they're going to tell you like, oh, it was so hard, johnny, you split me from front to back.
Speaker 2:These are some of the terms I've heard, even in my own verse story, like oh, you know, I just was so terrible and I was in so much pain I couldn't go back to work and my nipples were cracked. It was like but what about mom? So that's the first part. But then you say, mom, think back to when you held me for the first time and you'll see something switch in a woman's eyes, like our mother's eyes, and she'll go back to that moment. She will remember it so viscerally, so vividly. Oh, you smelled like this and you had these little fingers and you were making this little face and these little noises. They will remember the noises that you made and they'll talk about just how incredible it was to hold you and that will help those young men in their subconscious become reprogrammed to realize that there's something far more important here about birth.
Speaker 2:And now you have a woman in your life who's going to give birth to your baby usually, and they're going to get to go through this.
Speaker 2:They're going to be holding a baby that you created with them and they're going to go through that and it's going to be really hard and they're probably going to feel like they're dying. But that's not the only story, that's not the only chapter. There's all these other emotions that are layered in there, and so having men go and have their own birth story retold to them is like therapy beyond his years. That's worth like 10 years of therapy for us men. So it's a great connecting exercise, especially if you can do it together with your moms. But that is a very, very important way that I get people to appreciate. You know, this apprehension is very valid, but it doesn't have to be the only conversation, the only story that you have about birth. And you can tell them birth stories, watch them, make them watch YouTube videos. You can do all that, but it's not the same as hearing your mother talk about how beautiful it was for you to be in their arms.
Speaker 1:That's cool. That's a very interesting way to go about it. I hadn't thought of that as a thing, so thank you for sharing that prescription. I think that's going to help a lot of people. I have a hard time at this point when I hear people's birth stories. I've heard my husband's birth story and I'm just sitting there the whole time going.
Speaker 1:Intervention intervention intervention, and then that's why you know I'm I'm like putting all the pieces together of why it turned out in the way that it did, but I I see the value in recalling those things, so thank you for sharing that. That's awesome, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anything else for men to know, or you know, because they they need to go through this. Whether, wherever a woman is having birth, it's important for her husband or partner to be supportive. And there and it sounds like you had a similar experience with your wife your first that my husband and I had that once I was in labor and I'm like screaming and whatever he's like, step it in the background. I'm like, do your own thing here, lady. Yeah, and we both had a lot of regrets about that and you know, fortunately we're able to do that over again Twice now. So, yeah, I don't know, do that over again twice now. So I don't know if you have anything else that, but I think what I was trying to just put out there is, I see that there's a lot of room for men like you who have seen birth, experienced it, you know, understand it, to speak to other men and educate and teach and all that.
Speaker 1:And I think that that's a lot. That's what you're doing, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's key. Like we meet up monthly as a group of soon to be dads, current dads, veteran dads in the Born Free program. We meet up every month. We have some guest speakers and that's really helpful for men to just have other men that have like gone through this or you know there's there.
Speaker 2:There are certain marriages that fall apart through the fertility journey because there's nobody there talking to the men and because it's hard for the women. I mean, the whole thing is just really, really hard for people. But oftentimes men, I think they want to take advantage of the opportunity to be a active part of this, but they are given that opportunity. So what I would encourage men is to approach the childbirth experience with not the intention of solving any problem. I know it's cliche, but just as a reminder, there's no problem here for you to solve and you're going to get to see your partner go through some really horrific stuff mentally, emotionally, emotionally, maybe even spiritually through this experience and it's going to be hard for you to sit there and just be a part of it and bear witness. That actually is the best thing you can do. We don't need you to flex your muscles. We know you're big and strong. We don't care. We want to see how well you can sit on your hands and just be still and bear witness, which is why I think it's helpful for men like me to have actually been to so many births like.
Speaker 2:That part was still still incredible in our birth experience. But I I wasn't like looking for a problem to solve. I was actually for me, it was sort of like uh, tempering my excitement, like I was like a, like a lab, a Labrador, like, oh, I want to be. I'm like so excited I'm not afraid of it so much that I'm in there and I actually need to get my masculine energy out of the way. Most men like are stuck on the wall. I had to like pull myself back and be super, super stoked on the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Well, you also have this. You also had this medical background.
Speaker 2:I imagine that makes it even harder yeah, yeah, so I don't think that there's any. Um, I don't think that there was any. Like one of my macbook speakers now my headphones died. Um, that's hilarious. I should probably go for dinner. Um, yeah, I had the medical background, I had all of that, but it was also um, it was also trying to like. Your masculine energy really forms a, a nice like anchor for her feminine energy. When she's, when she's roaring a baby out, like she's transforming and she's arching her back and she's on different positions, knowing that I'm just there as an anchor was sufficient for my very feminine, very, very like enraptured wife. You know, in that, in that process but watching a person go through that, you would think that there's some problem there to be solved. But it wasn't more lemonade, it wasn't more sage, and in fact she was like enough with all that stuff. It was just being still and being present and not being on my phone and just being there with her.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, awesome, nathan. Thank you again. I appreciate it. I'm going to let you go now You're done. All right, if you're looking for Nathan, you can find him on Instagram at Nathan Riley OBGYN or at Born Free Method, which is oh, there's an Instagram account, and then you can also go to bornfreemethodcom. So, thank you again. I really appreciate you sharing all this, and we're going to have to break these, uh, these episodes up, but it's going to be awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There you go and, uh, thank you all for tuning in and for being on this journey with us. If you'd like to follow along outside the podcast, you can do so on instagram, facebook and on youtube at the radiant mission, and today we're going to close. The bible verse all right, romans 15 and 13. May the god of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by power, the power of the holy spirit, and we're wishing you a radiant week. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 2:Bye everyone Goodbye.
