The New York Times just published an article announcing that continuous electronic fetal monitoring doesn’t improve outcomes.
Bravo. So proud of you NYT. Total gold.
-You must be new here-
This article took off as we all sighed like “We already told you”
They framed it like breaking news.
Like this wasn’t known in the 1970s.
Like thousands of women didn’t lose their uteruses, their autonomy, and their trust in the system while academics waited for permission to admit it.
We’ve known this for decades.
Evidence Based Birth was publishing this data before social media existed.
Cochrane has been screaming it for forty years.
Every midwife who’s ever worked in a home environment knew it from experience — every advocate who held the line inside the institutions - we knew- not because we read it, but because we saw it.
EFM doesn’t save babies. It creates panic, interventions, and unnecessary surgeries.
It’s the single most common obstetric procedure in the United States — and one of the least evidence-based.
So why does it still dominate? Liability. Optics. Institutional laziness.
The monitor never made birth safer. It made birth easier to bill and defend in court.
This isn’t about technology. At least not this post.
This is about skill decay — professional collapse hidden behind blinking lights.
Most hospitals can’t tell you what position your baby is in without an ultrasound.
Most residents have never seen a normal breech birth.
Most providers have never witnessed a physiological third stage.
If you ask about it, they’ll look at you like you’re quoting folklore.
This isn’t “modern medicine.” It’s amnesia.
When a profession loses touch with its own physiology, it doesn’t deserve monopoly status.
When the only remaining practitioners who can safely attend these births are being fined, arrested, or erased, you should start asking what’s really being protected — safety or hierarchy.
The New York Times thinks this is a story about machines.
It’s not.
It’s about how an entire industry traded manual skill for algorithmic management, then called it progress.
They don’t teach how to resolve shoulder dystocia without panic.
They don’t teach vaginal breech.
They don’t teach hands-on assessment of fetal position.
They don’t teach how to interpret labor without a screen or putting their hands inside someone’s body.
And now they’re shocked that outcomes haven’t improved.
This is what happens when birth becomes an administrative act instead of a physiological event.
If we’re going to talk about reform, it can’t stop at “maybe we over-monitor.”
It has to go all the way:
Who approved a national standard that ignored every major review since 1980?
Why are we criminalizing the few remaining providers who retain the skills hospitals lost?
Why is informed refusal treated as deviance instead of a right?
The federal government wants to fix maternal mortality? Start here.
Start by acknowledging that skill loss is measurable harm.
Start by recognizing that the right to give birth at home, with a midwife who still knows how to do the work, is not an alternative lifestyle — it’s constitutional protection.
Because if the institutions can’t deliver a breech, can’t identify fetal position by hand, can’t attend a physiological third stage, and can’t support labor without a monitor, then the problem isn’t the mothers. It’s the system.
So no — I’m not impressed that the Times finally caught up.
I’m furious it took this long.
Half a century of unnecessary surgery, trauma, and policy built on bad evidence.
Birth didn’t get riskier. But it will. Soon we wont be able to deliver big babies vaginally. We wont know how to have babies without machines and medications.
On an evolutionary scale, what have we done…
NTY how about you talk about THAT.
Not impressed.