Tom Nichols may be a Never Trump scold, but he's right on one thing, his book The Death of Expertise describes our current internet culture where people online purport to be smarter than the trained doctors, lawyers, scholars and engineers, and more and more folks are turning to these internet "experts" rather than the actual ones for advice.
Often these internet geniuses are so toxic towards the actual experts that it actively dissuades people from listening to the actual masters of their field at all (asee the anti-vax movement as a primary example).
And sometimes, as in our Sunday Long Read about internet advice on "freebirth", that toxicity can be fatal.
Judith has wavy chocolate-colored hair, matching almond eyes and a mouth that naturally sits in an upturned, playful smile. As she sits on her living room sofa nine months after her loss, her freshly bitten fingernails offer a clue to the anxiety that often overwhelms her.
Judith asked that NBC News not use her full name, fearing a backlash from the trolls, paid-per-click bloggers and well-meaning health advocates who congregate in online spaces to debate birth choices. Judith is terrified they’ll say the things she already tells herself in the darkest moments.
“I can’t take any more guilt,” she said.
It’s impossible to know whether Judith’s baby would be alive if she had induced at 42 weeks or scheduled a cesarean section or made any choices other than the ones she did. The hospital didn’t perform an autopsy, and doctors couldn’t explain exactly why her baby’s heart stopped beating. Even so, Judith has spent every day since then replaying different scenarios, imagining a better outcome and asking herself just how she got here.
As well as she can figure, it started with the podcasts.
Judith worked at a flower shop. The daily drive was an hour outside of town, time she filled by listening to podcasts. When she got pregnant, she devoured episodes of “The Birth Hour” and “Indie Birth,” popular programs on which women shared their childbirth stories, which ranged from hospital to home births. But it was the “Free Birth Podcast” that really spoke to Judith.
Billed as “a supportive space for people who are learning, exploring and celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth,” the podcast features Emilee Saldaya, 35, a Los Angeles freebirth advocate and founder of the Free Birth Society. The group has 46,000 followers on Instagram, and its podcast hit a million downloads last year.
On the podcast, Saldaya interviews mothers about their freebirth stories. These women reminded Judith of herself; they were college educated, spiritual, creative types who spoke about their births in powerful, radical terms: as euphoric events that happened in bathtubs, in nature or in their own beds, surrounded by their partners and family. Women in these podcasts weren’t listening to doctors but to their bodies. They weren’t lying on their backs waiting for someone to pull a baby from them but bringing their babies into the world with their own two hands.
Judith tore through some 70 episodes. She relistened to her favorites, one of which featured a woman who had given birth by candlelight in an off-the-grid yurt in the California mountains with only her husband and a dog she called her “midwolf.”
While she listened, Judith would daydream, imagining herself as a future guest on the podcast.
“I became obsessed,” Judith said. “I would just wonder, ‘What's my story going to be like?’ and think, ‘I want my story to be as badass as their stories.’”
Given the massive uptick in child mortality in the United States in the last twenty years, especially among black women giving birth, this seems massively irresponsible. I have nothing but empathy for Judith and her story. It's the people who convinced her that this was the right thing to do that will forever earn my ire.
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