Speaker 0
Welcome to the Free Birth Podcast, a supportive space for people who are learning, exploring, and celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth. Together, we'll unpack truths, share personal stories, and claim our ability to birth freely and intuitively. Here's your host, Emily Saldea.
Speaker 1
Today on the show, I have the brilliant Yolanda Clark from New Brunswick, Canada. Yolanda is a traditional birth attendant, a writer, and educator of autonomous birth. We dive into the controversial topic of ultrasounds, a subject Yolanda has spent the last eighteen years researching. We discuss what they are, the studies, the social impact, risks versus benefits, and of course, we share our many opinions.
Speaker 2
I do have a personal relationship to ultrasound, so that's informed my attitude and my perspective on it since the beginning. And actually, and this is something that I talk about in the podcast that I'm just about to release or that I will have already released by the time that anyone listens to this. It actually starts before I was pregnant with my mother. And my mom was pregnant with my little brother when I was eight, so there's eight years between us, and I remember very distinctly my mom coming home from one of her prenatal appointments, and she did things, you know, the conventional way. She had doctors and hospital births, And she came home and said that she'd been offered this thing called an ultrasound by her doctor. And she'd never heard of it before. It had never come up before. This was still in the eighties, late eighties. But I was born in eighty one, and this is the first time she'd ever encountered the term, and the doctor had offered her this ultrasound because she was so old. She was thirty nine years old. And this was way before ultrasound was really fully in the mainstream. It wasn't a standard of care. It was just offered to women who had serious issues like advanced age. And my mom, it just didn't even cross their mind. Like she was, no, of course she's not, like she doesn't need to like, look at the baby. You know, she's, it's fine. And I recall that because it really struck me how quickly our societal attitudes towards ultrasound changed because eleven years after my brother was born, I was then pregnant with my first baby. And actually, I had the same doctor that my mom had when she was pregnant with my brother, right? So when I was pregnant, the very first thing that this doctor said to me is that, Well, you need to go in and have an ultrasound. And so in that short space of time, just with this one individual doctor, her own attitudes towards ultrasound had shifted. So it wasn't even a problem for her, ultrasound, even though she was thirty nine, even though she apparently had all these supposed risk factors, right? But then eleven years later, with confronted with a nineteen year old woman, totally healthy, no issues, it was just automatic, right? You just go in for an ultrasound. And at that point, I didn't know anything. I was completely ignorant. I would I knew that I was maybe interested in having a home birth, but that idea hadn't even really coalesced in my mind. So, you know, unthinkingly, I went to the ultrasound clinic and, and I showed up there, and I remember I was told to keep a full bladder, so that's very uncomfortable, and I sat in the waiting room and I waited, and then I went into the room, and they asked me to take my pants off, and I had no idea what was even happening. Woah. And it turned out that they were giving me a transvaginal ultrasound. Just for kicks? Well, yeah, it's just, like, thinking back to that now, I mean, I thought of myself then as, you know, a strong, powerful, decisive young woman. And I just it was like, Oh, okay, I guess you know, I just didn't even really. And I think I think this happens to a lot of people, and it definitely I mean, it does for me now, and this is probably one of the reasons why I don't engage with the medical system. Like, it it almost sort of puts us you're kind of under a spell of their authority, right? And I just I was sort of in a daze and I just I complied. And then, I mean, the whole experience was so absolutely hellish. But what happened afterwards was interesting because two days later, two days after this transvaginal ultrasound, I started to miscarry. And that whole experience was a catalyst for, you know, doing all the research that I did, kind of really making a decision to remove myself from the medical system, and very soon after that, I was pregnant with my, the first baby that was born. So I had this first miscarriage and then this other experience, but, ultrasound, it's really hard to say whether or not the ultrasound was the reason for the miscarriage. I mean, no one will ever know. But over the course of the past, you know, almost twenty years now, eighteen years, I have been researching the issue really extensively. And especially after that experience, the experience of my miscarriage, I started to look into ultrasound in particular, and what I discovered about that technology has really actually informed so much of all of the work that I've done in birth. And it's not just the effects of the technology on living tissue that I find so compelling and chilling, really. It's also the symbolism of ultrasound and what ultrasound represents ideologically and metaphorically in our culture and how that really plays into so much of how birth is approached in the medical system and in midwifery and in every aspect of how we do birth as a culture.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I completely agree. For me personally, I just knew I didn't want it. I wasn't drawn to it. It was this such a epicenter of everything that, you know, that paradigm represents, like you were just getting at. What I know is very minimal, which is it's never been proven safe, and it can or does damage healthy cells. That's about or tissue. That's about the extent like, first of all, that's enough for me to not blast my my poor little fetus with with this, like, mystery technology. But can you speak to a little bit about that specific part? Because, of course, doctors aren't talking about this, and I would imagine most don't even know. You know, informed consent is in no way practiced. This is such an assumed part of, quote, unquote, care. Why isn't this, you know, public knowledge? And and for women listening who have never heard anything about this, can you elaborate a little bit more on the damaging the cells concept?
Speaker 2
I mean, I really need to say like, I need to be very transparent about the fact that I'm not I'm not a scientist. I'm not a doc like, I don't have any qualifications at all. And, frankly, I don't really understand how ultrasound works. Okay? I've just poured over these studies and articles over the years, and so I have a concept of what the what what the effect is. But I I don't really get it on a on a on a
Speaker 1
Well, I think that's how it's able to continue. I don't either. It's super confusing. I've asked providers how it works, and they don't understand. So Right. I think that's such a good point. I mean, I'm sure there are people out there that maybe could explain it to me, but I've never read anything that I can fully wrap my head around what it is. It's an echo. It's a it's not you're not even actually seeing what's in there. It's an echo of the sound waves. I mean, it sounds confusing. It's easy to just kinda shut down and be like, it's my baby.
Speaker 2
Right. And also, I mean, it's sound. Right? Like, sound is fine. Like, like, what's the problem? And and that's very interesting too because I've asked those same questions of, you know, doctors and regulated midwives and nurses. And now and then, in the past and in the present, it's almost impossible to find a medical professional who will actually be upfront about the fact that there are risks to this technology. The vast majority of practitioners will actually look at a woman with a straight face and say, it's perfectly safe. It's just sound. It's just sound waves. But what I know about ultrasound is that essentially it consists of high frequency sound waves that are beamed onto an object, and depending on the density of the object, the sound beams bounce back and that creates an image. So that's really all I understand about it. But the history of ultrasound is really fascinating. It really kind of came into being as a military technology, actually, as a way to, keep track of of,
Speaker 1
Submarines or
Speaker 2
submarines. Right? Yeah. Exactly. And so it was used in To locate the military to locate submarines.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 2
So it's got this sort of dark history as a, you know, a a weaponized technology. The thing about ultrasound too is is that it's hard to because there have been no definitive studies proving that ultrasound is safe or definitively proving any causation when it comes to any specific health issues, you kind of, I guess if you want to, you can look at the big picture of all of these different sort of little pieces of research and little pieces of knowledge that we have about what it about how the technology behaves and then put together an idea that you know, for yourself as to, you know, how you feel about it because there's no definitive research in the area of health. And I actually think that its ubiquity really comes down, for the most part, to economics, so money, and the enormous investment that health care systems have made in this technology. So we've poured money into ultrasound, and ultrasound alone represents an enormous portion of the funding that has gone into obstetrics as a field, right? So here we have these health care systems that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into these ultrasound machines, and the health care system in Canada is not the same as the US, but let me use Canada as an example because it's there are similar factors in every country. So we have socialized health care in Canada, so, we don't pay out of pocket to go and visit a doctor. But nonetheless, the government funds health care, and the way that it works is that every time a patient or an individual is sent for a specific treatment or a specific diagnostic, that specific treatment has a cost associated with it. So the health care system bills the government for that specific treatment. So we have this system that is bolstering this enormous infrastructure of which ultrasound plays a major part. So we have the machines, we have ultrasound technicians, we have nurses who are working in the ultrasound areas. So there's really no incentive whatsoever to minimize, the use of this technology because it's already we have these structures that are already set up. So the Canadian healthcare system functions under this sort of continuous self fulfilling sort of circular conflict of interest in a way, right? Because we've hired these people, we've bought this equipment. Every time someone is sent to have an ultrasound, the system gets an injection of money from the government, right? So, I mean, it's it's it's very complicated, but there's just been so much investment in this in this technology that it that that, I think, plays a part in why no one really wants to know that it's dangerous. No one really wants to talk about the risk. Well, it's our
Speaker 1
it's our generation's x rays. I mean, we shutter that a couple generations ago, they were blasting pregnant women with x rays. And in, x amount of generations from now, I couldn't I couldn't guess when they will look back on ultrasounds and and, you know, I mean, I've heard this commentary from, other researchers that this is our generation's x-ray of pregnant moms.
Speaker 2
I I think that's true, but I think where where things get tricky with ultrasound is that the effects are, as far as we know at this point, much more subtle and cumulative. And we're also and so, okay, this is an interesting thing, too. So one of the arguments that I hear from other mothers and other individuals often is, like, okay, yeah, you know, maybe ultrasound's not the best, but, you know, look at the world. We're bombarded constantly with, you know, toxins and dangers and all that. What's one little ultrasound going to do? And my perspective is like, yes, that's precisely why I will not have an ultrasound you know, factors and, and exposed to all kinds of hazards. So I think that it's very complicated and it is probably a relatively subtle effect, but that's actually the aspect of ultrasound that is not ambiguous. The fact that we know that ultrasound damages and modifies and destroys cells. And, you know, we know that because of simply how the technology functions. So there are two effects that we're aware that ultrasound has on living tissue, and the first is that the tissues become heated, overly, overly heated. And then there's also a process called cavitation, which, again, I don't really completely understand, but essentially the basic concept is that ultrasound creates these pockets of gas that then kind of bubble and this causes damage to tissues. So we know that that occurs, but the argument again is that, you know, it's relatively subtle, it's probably not that big a deal, and supposedly, the benefits outweigh the risks. Okay? So in order to really think about that clearly, like, we have to examine what are the supposed benefits of ultrasound. Right? And I just it's such a frustrating issue for me because I don't personally see any benefit to ultrasound. Like, it is I think there's this concept out there among, you know, pregnant mothers and doctors maybe as well that, you know, ultrasound has this sort of power to grant insight into, you know, what's going on with your developing baby.
Speaker 1
A hundred percent. That's literally what everyone thinks.
Speaker 2
That's literally what everyone thinks. But there's it seems to me that there's very little thought behind that because that little fuzzy, black and white photograph that everyone receives and they all kind of look the same. Right?
Speaker 1
That's an echo of a sound. Yeah.
Speaker 2
It's an echo of a sound. And that image, that's what ultrasound does. Like, you can look at that all you want, but you're not actually really seeing that much that can give any information. So,
Speaker 1
you know What can ultrasound give
Speaker 2
us? So ultrasound can tell us that your baby is moving around at that particular moment in time at which the photograph was taken. So that's another thing, right? Okay. So let me back pedal a little bit. This is, I hear from women all the time, and you can read these in every thread on social media. I had my ultrasound, and I'm so happy and excited because my baby is so healthy and it's great. I mean, an ultrasound cannot ever confirm to a woman that her baby is healthy. All an ultrasound can say, all an ultrasound can reveal is that, yes, there's a baby in there, yes, it was moving around at the precise moment that the ultrasound was undertaken, yes, it has two arms and two legs and a head.
Speaker 1
And that there's only one or two or three.
Speaker 2
There's only one or two or three. Right. But, you know, yeah.
Speaker 1
And that there's a heartbeat at the time.
Speaker 2
At the time that the ultrasound is taken. That's right. I mean, five minutes later Yeah. A a baby could could could, could die after the ultrasound. Not I'm not suggesting that that that happens because of an ultrasound, but but it's just that that the picture that you receive an ultrasound, it is just an image of a moment in time. You know? It doesn't give you any insight into the before or the after or really the status of health of your baby at all. You know?
Speaker 1
And of course, we we know that the vast majority of things that ultrasound is suspected to help with to help give insight can all be done through more traditional midwifery, you know, tools, like palpating and, you know, really simple things.
Speaker 2
Exactly. And I go into that in in my podcast, too. And and the thing about so exactly. In every in every instance of the supposed benefits of ultrasound, we can glean that information in other ways. So the issue, though, is that for let's take, you know, let's take, the gestational age of a baby, right? Ultrasound is actually fairly accurate at determining a baby's gestational age prior to ten weeks gestation. But I guess my question about that is, A, I don't really feel that there's any necessity in determining with any real accuracy gestational age. There's lots of arguments for and against that, but to my mind, it's not a huge priority. But also, between ten weeks and, you know, twenty five weeks or even full term, there are so many ways to determine approximate gestational age using a variety of different holistic and non invasive methods. However, however, all of those require a relationship with the pregnant woman. All of those require some degree of intimacy with the pregnant woman. Whereas ultrasound is sort of, again, this perfect symbol of industrial obstetrics because a woman comes in, she lays down, you do the thing, you see the stuff on the screen, and then out she goes. And it's such a very sort of on the surface level, it's a very easy way of, you know, getting some information that you can then put down on a chart. But it really feeds into this, situation that we have now where we have this term called prenatal care, but in reality, it couldn't be it couldn't be further from what constitutes true caring.
Speaker 1
It's like prenatal harm.
Speaker 2
It's it's some prenatal harm. It's prenatal indifference. You know?
Speaker 1
Where do you get your prenatal harm?
Speaker 2
Yeah. It's terrible. It's it's just sad and terrible, and I I can't stand it. Oh, dear.
Speaker 1
Okay. Okay. So we went over things that it can show us and that many of those things can be shown and learned through midwifery techniques. Of course, the doctor would have to know those techniques. Other than being willing to have a relationship with the woman, they would actually need to know them. Right? And how many women see an OB or or a group of OBs or just a nurse practitioner that, you know, only sees the OB in labor, etcetera, where nobody touches the woman. And she's not touched one time. Right? And that's that's, as far as I'm aware, the most common way that obstetrics goes down, at least in America. Nobody's palpating. Nobody's touching. So, yeah, such
Speaker 2
a Exactly. Such a
Speaker 1
good point about you actually have to have a relationship.
Speaker 2
And that and that that actually relates also to, you know, the ritual of listening to a baby's heartbeat. So, another rationale for the use of ultrasound, another supposed benefit of ultrasound comes in terms of of Doppler use. So so I think a lot of people also still don't quite understand that a Doppler is ultrasound. So the Doppler is it's just audio, but again, it uses exactly the same technology. It is an ultrasound device. And we're told that, you know, it's such a great thing that we can use a Doppler to listen to your baby's heartbeat at ten weeks. Like, you don't have to wait for until twenty weeks. Right? Because, it's not until about twenty weeks that you can discern the baby's heartbeat using a fetoscope. But why on earth do we need to listen to a baby's heartbeat at ten weeks? I mean, what what what what does that do? What does
Speaker 1
that give us? What that does is it tells us we are pregnant and so we can plan and plan and plan and plan and feel this sense of control over what we're doing.
Speaker 2
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1
Knowing none of that was on the table for me, I really had to or chose to pay attention. And I knew when my cycles were, and I knew when they weren't. I knew when I, you know, I knew when I was fertile, and I knew when I conceived. And, you know, I know not everybody has it that clear, of course, and cycles can be crazy or people can be breastfeeding when they conceive and things are all different. But, it really invited me to take a much deeper look at my experience and, of course, obviously, approach the whole spiritual side of things without this outside validation. You know, not knowing if the fetus was continuing to thrive in that time between when I stopped being sick to about when I started showing, which is around sixteen weeks. So between, like, twelve and sixteen weeks, you know, which is it would have been so validating to have had a Doppler, and I could just hear this little heartbeat because, of course, we're being, worked on, you know, in your pregnancy that so much of the work is to sit in the unknown and to feel the worry in your body and and decide how to deal with it. And, you know, I would have been robbed of that work if I had this false sense of security by turning to a doppler at any point in my pregnancy, but especially in that one month where I, you know, I didn't feel any symptoms because the nausea went away. Anyway Yeah.
Speaker 2
I know. Exactly. That's all very important. And, of course, you know, we live in a culture where immediate gratification is, you know, a necessity or seen as a necessity. We can't deal with any uncertainty, as you said. Yeah. But the other thing that this insistence on kind of documenting and, you know, confirming all of a pregnancy at whatever stage is that part of it feeds into the setup for induction, like establishing dates and, you know, doing the ultrasounds and the heart tones at all of these different sort of times that doctors have decided at the right times. That actually often serves as a pretext for ensuring that doctors maintain control throughout a pregnancy and then also can, you know, drum up this sort of evidence if they feel they need to, when a woman is near her birth time so that they can enact more control. And it sounds like, you know, I'm you know, imagining this grand conspiracy theory. And I don't know. In a way, it is. It's not, you know, it's not really that sinister because it's pretty upfront. I mean, that's one of
Speaker 1
the craziest things about this whole conversation is how maybe not nationally known, but how many, many, many, many people within the system and birth workers, etcetera, know how notoriously inaccurate ultrasounds are. So we're making this technology be the end all, be all, must have. It's crazy if you don't use it. It gives us so much information, so much peace of mind. And on the other flip side, we all know how inaccurate it is. I mean, not all, obviously. Most people don't, but it's pretty wild that we know, especially people who attend births in hospital, you know, that they say, oh, your baby's measuring at about eight pounds. They don't follow that up with then saying, and we know that that is within and, usually within a two pound, you know, guesstimate, you know, which which is the truth. Right? So Yeah. Anyone's I mean, we hear. Yeah. If you're if you're hearing that your baby's nine and that's reason to induce or have c section and then your baby comes out seven pounds, I hope you're fucking pissed. You know? Well, that
Speaker 2
happens all the time.
Speaker 1
It happens all the time.
Speaker 2
All the time. No. No. Ultrasound is notoriously poor at determining the size of a baby. Fluid is a huge, huge rationale for, ordering ultrasound. And that just it just makes me laugh because it's a terrible determinant of fluid levels. Furthermore, external palpation is a far, far better way to like, it just it it it it's it's
Speaker 1
But this isn't a question of if there's a better way. They literally are not trained in it, you know, or they don't they don't do it. I mean, I I mean, find me a woman who's getting palpated by a doctor. You know? I I don't think that there's many out there. You know? So knowing how inaccurate the whole the whole thing is, how little insight it can really give us.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 1
It it is. It's just that it is ultimately a social commentary on how willing we are to have these technocratic birth systems and not even not even look at them, and that we're the ones that are crazy that we don't want something. That literally doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2
Yep. And, actually, it it it statistically doesn't make sense because what the scientific studies show is that whether or not a woman has an ultrasound doesn't actually improve her chances of having a positive outcome. So this is an example of a study that was done I think it was done in Helsinki, it was a little while ago. So, again, there are very few recent studies done on ultrasound, and I think there's this sort of idea within the medical community that that chapter is closed. Like, we've we've decided ultrasound's great. Yes. There were some studies in the, you know, nineties that, you know, had some very frightening, results, but we're just gonna ignore that and move on, you know, with our project. But anyway, this is a very, very compelling study and I think it's still relevant. It was done in Helsinki. I don't have quite the information right in front of me, but I'll summarize it. So it was a group of, I think, two or three thousand women who were looked at and, this was a study done on placenta previa. So this is another issue that comes up as a rationale for ultrasound. So this is something that I've noticed over the years. I've noticed it in myself and also, with many, many, many of many women that I've worked with, and that's that when they go into their doctor's office and they say, Well, actually, I don't want an ultrasound, the doctor, sells it, pushes it on them or sells it with such aggression that they really feel like they can't refuse. And one of the big selling points of ultrasound is, you know, how are you going to find out if you have placenta previa or not if you don't have an ultrasound? That's the only way you can find out. So first of all, that's not true because placenta previa very rarely presents asymptomatically. In the majority of cases, there will be bleeding in the second or third trimester. So it's unusual. Not impossible, but unusual that it would present without symptoms. But the other thing is that, you know, a very skilled practitioner can often hear the placenta, locate the placenta using a fetoscope or a pinard horn. You do need a lot of skill to do that. So, you know, it's something that, you know, has to it requires training. But that's another way that, you know, the placement of the placenta can be determined. But this study done in Helsinki was very, very interesting because they were looking at this they had separated this group of women into two groups. One who had who received, many ultrasounds and another group that received no ultrasounds. And early on in the study, when, I think it was undertaken sort of between a certain period of time in the middle of their pregnancy. So when the study was first done, the group of women who received ultrasounds, I think quite a large percentage of them were diagnosed as having placenta previa, which is such a nonsense diagnosis prior to the end of a pregnancy anyway because the placement of the placenta will shift because the uterus itself grows. So often, we're seeing this more and more, actually, that women at, you know, twenty weeks or twenty five weeks gestation are being diagnosed with placenta previa based on an ultrasound because at that point in their pregnancy, their placenta may be lying somewhat low, somewhat close to the cervix. Sorry. Placenta previa is when the placenta is obstructing the cervix and is lying over top of the woman's cervix, so as to obstruct the passage of the baby. It is a very serious condition. True placenta previa can, you know, compromise the life of the mother and the baby and can cause serious problems. So it's not something to dismiss, not at all, but we're seeing women being diagnosed with placenta previa at twenty weeks and twenty five weeks. And the fact of the matter is, the way that the uterus grows as a baby is growing, the uterus grows up and out. So the placenta will always sort of by default be displaced away from the woman's cervix.
Speaker 1
So the placenta is already anchored in to whatever part of the uterus it has locked into. So as the uterus grows weird. The placenta grows with it or your carries on with it.
Speaker 2
Exactly. Exactly. So this study in Helsinki showed that early on in their pregnancies, the women who are receiving ultrasounds, many of them were diagnosed with placenta previa. At the end of these women's pregnancies, all of the women, the women who received ultrasounds and the women who didn't receive ultrasounds, there was the same rate of placenta previa among both cohorts and the same rate of problems associated with placenta previa. So it really this study proved that there's actually no statistical benefit in terms of placenta previa in doing ultrasounds either, And yet it continues, ultrasound continues to be held up as one of the main placenta previa continues to be held up as one of the main reasons for ordering an ultrasound. And this is what so many of the women that I've worked with have been confronted with is, you know, they go in and they decline an ultrasound, the doctor says, Well, don't you care about your baby? Like, what about placenta previa? Do you want your baby to die? And that is literally what women are hearing from their own obstetricians. And it is so manipulative and and really just it's manipulative and also exposes the ignorance of so many medical practitioners, really.
Speaker 1
I know a woman who was recently labeled high risk by her doctor because she declined an ultrasound. So now declining the ultrasound makes you high risk because if they don't know what they think they can know from an ultrasound, you're now high risk. Right. Pretty fascinating. And and, you know, just into that around around palpating for fluids and, you know, I was when you were talking, I had this flash of how many births I've been to where the woman comes in in labor and they wanna do one more ultrasound just to confirm that the head's down. And, you know, she's already been in to see her doctor, like, ten times in the last month. And, yes, babies can flip at the end. And, yes, that is possible, but it's usually a resident who's learning how to use ultrasound, and it's all just it's so it's so obvious, all of the layers of what's happening. But, anyway sure. You know? But, of course, like, what's another way that we could determine if the head's down? Like, it's
Speaker 2
Oh my gosh. I mean, that's not even really difficult at all. It's so kind of simple. Of course. Yeah. It's so ridiculous. But but but one of the reasons yes. I think what we what you mentioned about, you know, residents getting training on women and ultrasonic them just for fun, that's something that's quite disgusting. But also, I think another real impetus for all of this rampant use of ultrasound is that for doctors, it is important for their liability to show that they have supposedly done their due diligence. Right? And ultrasound, again, is sort of it's the thing. It's the thing that you do to, you know, to do stuff. Well, in
Speaker 1
humans are fallible. Right? But an ultrasound is gonna show us that head. You know? So Yeah. It's it is that we as a as a society, we all know this, that we trust machines, you know, more than we trust ourselves. Those doctors trust the ultrasound more than they trust their own hands. You know. And doctors are not allowed to make mistakes and they, you know, are put in this crazy position of having to cover their ass in every possible situation. And so there we go. I mean, there's just so it is so complicated and there's so many factors leading to this huge crutch of society in obstetrics that's not improving outcomes. I mean, that's like the joke of it all. It's not actually improving outcomes.
Speaker 2
And I wanna just I don't I again, I don't have these studies at my fingertips, but I just wanna talk a little bit about the I have to be careful because I don't want to use the word evidence if that's not in fact accurate, but there is an enormous burden of information gleaned from studies done on animals that show that ultrasound has a very, very deleterious effect on the organs and tissues of
Speaker 1
mammals. It would be crazy to think that it wouldn't. It's blasting high frequency sound that we know heats it up. And then we're putting on external fetal monitoring for forty hours on a model.
Speaker 2
Is ultrasound, by the way. Ultrasound. People don't don't know that either. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So let's just make sure we say that. So Doppler and the ultrasound that shows the image and external fetal monitoring that they put on you prenatally usually, and it's the nonstress test, you know, whole ritual. If you dare to carry past forty weeks and then, you know, in labor, if you're in the hospital, the extended, you know, straps that are just shooting that frequency at your baby the whole time you're there.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Exactly. And it's funny when when I talk about or write about the animal studies that have been done, you know, many of them, and there's just such an urge on the part of so many women to dismiss all of that information. And yes, it's not maybe relevant in some ways because, no, we're not rats, but our physical structures and our tissues and the way that our organs function, it's very, very similar. So to my mind, it just doesn't make sense to refuse to kind of take all of that information into account. And then just another quick thing on the sort of science behind whether or not ultrasound is safe. There is a report that was recently published in the past couple of years by a man called Jim West, and it's a collation of, I think it's over one hundred studies that were done in China by Chinese researchers, and these are studies that were done on groups of women who were planning to abort their pregnancies. And so these scientists took these groups of women and they did extensive testing with ultrasound on these fetuses that were slated to be aborted, and it's a little bit sad, but anyway, and the results of those studies are published in this bibliography that Jim West has put out, and the results of his research, the results of the research of these Chinese scientists is absolutely shocking, and this is a collection of studies that is, has been paid no attention to by the Western medical community whatsoever, and I think quite universally dismissed because they have not undergone any kind of peer review, right? So these studies in China were done on over two thousand seven hundred pregnant mothers who are planning to abort their babies, and the ultrasounds were undertaken at a very early stage in gestation because these were mothers who were planning abortions, and, what studies found is that even very low doses of ultrasound at low frequencies at a very early stage gestation, so this is around the time when, you know, a lot of women have dating ultrasounds early on in their pregnancy, right? So this research showed that the ultrasound caused measurable damage to the brains, kidneys, immune systems, chorionic villi, and corneas of these aborted babies or these fetuses, the tissue of these fetuses. So I mean, I don't
Speaker 1
that it would have, like, corrected itself as it was I mean, because, obviously, we are having seemingly normal children in our society that are all getting blasted throughout their pregnancy. So if we're seeing massive damage in these studies, how how is that relate to what we are seeing in our society, which is, you know, seemingly functional human beings?
Speaker 2
Well, are we though? I mean, there are also studies done, that seem to indicate that there may be a strong correlation between ultrasound and this is a real flashpoint, but, you know, autism like behaviors. And I again, I really don't know. I'm not making any kind of judgment one way or another, but, you know, if if if you're if one was to ponder that suggestion, that actually corresponds very clearly with the rise of the the sort of universal prevalence of ultrasound in our society. So like the late eighties is when ultrasound really started to be employed, on a large scale. And that's also the time when, you know, we've seen this enormous, just kind of unbelievable spike in behavioral issues like, autism and attention deficit disorder and things like that. So, you know, there was a study done at the University of Washington, quite a few years ago that showed that pregnant mice exposed to thirty minutes of ultrasound experienced effects that altered the learning memory of and neuroanatomy of the baby mice born to those mothers. So, I mean, it's just like, to me, I I totally accept that there's no definitive proof of no causation for any of this, but I just I I could never feel comfortable, exposing my own kids to this.
Speaker 1
So when you say that it has been proven to damage healthy cells, was that in human tissues beyond the China study, or was that mostly in animal studies?
Speaker 2
Well, we know it's in human tissues because ultrasound is actually used specifically for the purposes of damaging cells. So ultrasound is used to help to treat the testicles of men who have testicular cancer. So ultrasound is used to kind of break up these cancerous tumors. Ultrasound is also used in physiotherapy quite a bit. And I think that's related to, again, kind of breaking up calcification in tissues, and that's a very interesting one as well because there was another study done. Where was that one done? That might have also been in Finland. And it showed that physiotherapists who were performing ultrasound technology, who were using ultrasound on their patients, had a much, much higher chance of miscarriage than control groups. So ultrasound is also, it's suggested that ultrasound may have something to do with, you know, miscarriage for those who are exposed to it.
Speaker 1
And so you're saying that the same the same ultrasound technology that's being used to break up calcification and to treat testicular cancer is also the same stuff, the same technology that's being used on our fetuses.
Speaker 2
Right. And isn't that enough? You know? Like, that's enough for me. I mean, each one of these individual points, each one of these individual studies, each one of these individual, items of fact about how ultrasound works is actually enough for me to deeply, deeply question the safety of this technology in our children. And yet, I think it's You know, I think the issue comes down to worldview in many ways. So, okay, here's an example of what I'm talking about. This was very, very fascinating to me. I've been asking women over the past twenty years about why it is that they have chosen to engage with ultrasound because I'm interested in sort of the psychology behind what goes into this decision, And something that someone said to me recently was that, you know, she she's aware of the risks of ultrasound to a degree, Yet she just had this intuitive sense that she should have one done. And I hear that a lot, actually. And I find it really interesting because it's almost as though like, it's interesting to me that anyone would link intuition with this kind of destructive twenty first century technology. It's almost akin to someone saying, like, I just had this intuitive sense that I needed to eat a donut. Like, literally no one needs to eat a donut ever. You know? Like, it doesn't If you're eating
Speaker 1
it, it's certainly not your intuition. It's not. Unless unless unless you've been into that doughnut and there was, like, a hundred dollar bill. That's right. Like, damn, that was so my intuition. I'm gonna eat five more. Exactly. Oh, right. No. It's very it's spiritual bypass. It because if you find something, you can call it your intuition. And if you don't find something, you can call it your intuition. You know? And and actually, I just wanna piggyback that really quick because I wanted to bring this up. Something that I hear all the time is, especially even women who are primarily mostly birthing out of the system, they will still say, well, of course, I'm still gonna get the twenty week. Oh, why is that? For peace of mind. Okay. So what is this peace of mind? What is this? Exactly. You know? And and maybe it is as simple as I wanna know if there's four limbs. Okay. What if there's not? You know, like, twenty weeks, honestly, I don't know if you should be getting an ultrasound if you're not prepared to terminate. And if you don't live in a in a place where, you know, if you if you find something that doesn't fit for you that you don't want to continue the pregnancy with, you know, otherwise, why what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do with that information that we already know might not even be true? So I had this conversation the other day with a friend, and she said, I said, what kind of prenatal, you know, assistance do you think you'll seek? And she said, well, I'll probably get one ultrasound for peace of mind. And I said, oh, that's interesting. What peace of mind will it give you? She said, well, just to, you know, show me that the baby's okay. Okay. So at what point in your pregnancy does an ultrasound tell you that your baby's okay? Well, I don't know. You don't you get it at, like, twenty weeks? So what happens at twenty weeks? What is it showing you? Do you know what ultrasound is? And just blank face.
Speaker 2
Yep.
Speaker 1
You know? So that's
Speaker 2
All the time.
Speaker 1
And this is what you and I talk about all the time, you know, privately is this episode is not about shaming women who have had ultrasounds or who may choose to get an ultrasound. It is about applying critical thought to these rituals that we are under the influence of in our society that no one is criticizing or, you know, looking under the blanket and looking at what else is there. And if ultrasound really gave us peace of mind, wouldn't we be seeing better outcomes? Wouldn't we be walking around having better pregnancies? You know, wouldn't we be more peace of mind? You know? Yeah. At twenty weeks, you can already check the heartbeat with a fetus scope. So okay. We already know that there's a heartbeat. So what else is this ultrasound going to give you? And, you know, my my judgment of doing these potentially harmful things to pregnancies is you better have a good fucking reason. If you're gonna do this to your kid, you better have a good reason why you're doing it. And that's what you mentioned in the beginning of of benefits, you know, outweighing the risks. What is the benefit? Is there any good reason for ultrasound? Or and for and furthermore, is there a good reason for transvaginal ultrasound? Because that's like a whole another violation and assault.
Speaker 2
So You know? Yeah. I mean, for me, I would never have an ultrasound. Like, I literally cannot conceive of a scenario in which I would ever choose to have an ultrasound because even in the case of finding a heart defect, finding a major, developmental difference, there's literally nothing that can be done. There's nothing that can be done. And actually, I've had women bring to me these hypothetical scenarios like, you know, what if your baby has all of its organs developing outside of its body? I forget the term, but that's something that sometimes can happen. And I can say very honestly my preference would be to go through the course of my pregnancy with a state of trust and peace and assuming that all is well, or perhaps having some kind of genuine intuition that all is not well, and then to be able to birth my baby in the peace and quiet of my home and take action at that point if necessary. You know? Right.
Speaker 1
But I think the other side of that is would would it be too late, you know, to birth a baby at home with a birth def with a birth defect of any kind, especially something serious, would it be too late to transfer? And this is where we get into, are we really trusting?
Speaker 2
Yeah. And it's really unfortunate because, again, this comes back to the fact that doctors are always telling women that, oh, you know, great. Your ultrasound looks good, your baby is healthy, or allowing women to assume that an ultrasound that appears to be normal means that they have a healthy baby because spina bifida can be missed by an ultrasound. All sorts of issues can be missed by an ultrasound, but it's easy for doctors to allow women to believe that their ultrasound means they have a healthy baby, because in the vast majority of cases, their babies are going to appear healthy anyway, right? And then there's also the argument that people make, which is that, well, I had six ultrasounds and, like, my kid's super smart, so, you know, go to hell. You must be full of shit. And, like, I find that strange too because maybe, yeah, maybe your kid's super smart, but maybe they could be a little bit smarter if they had, if you had that.
Speaker 1
Well, I mean, that's the whole vaccination thing too. Like one woman can watch her child be become ill from a vaccine, and another mom says, well, my kid did fine, so what you're saying is not true. It's Yeah. It's it's an irrelevant, you know, conversation.
Speaker 2
Doesn't have any real validity. Yep. Exactly. But I actually to me, it's almost similar to and this may come across as terribly offensive, but that's Okay. It's almost like smoking a cigarette has an objective effect of calming the nervous system for a short period of time. Like, that's one of the reasons why people smoke. It relaxes them. And smoking used to be a part of pregnancy. Women used to you know, doctors used to tell women, like, you can smoke three cigarettes a day to just, you know, calm yourself down. So it's like, do we I don't see it really as terribly different, really, in a way, right? Like ultrasound for peace of mind, like, how does that work? You're gonna expose your child to high frequency sound waves in utero, damaging their cells so that you can have peace of mind? To me it's like smoking a cigarette for peace of mind.
Speaker 1
I don't it doesn't exist. Think we are considered broken. And so an ultrasound proves that we are or are not. You know, the peace of mind is, am I growing a healthy baby? All I hear are horror stories, and all I hear are babies getting sick, and all I hear are, you know, how how our bodies don't work and how my sister needed an emergency c section, but I know she really wanted that natural birth and etcetera etcetera. I mean, we're we're bombarded with all of this evidence, all of this, you know, false evidence that our bodies are broken. So this really, to me, peace of mind is saying, I have something. I have some technology that we as a society trust telling me I am growing a healthy baby. And so I can birth at home or I can whatever. You know, what I can relax. I can have peace of mind now that this agreed upon thing that is not me because I'm not allowed to just trust my body. Right? I mean, I've interviewed so many women who the way they were treated by their family and community when they chose not to have a scan is repulsive.
Speaker 2
Yeah. No. It's it's actually seen as, you know, a form of, like, gross negligence to decline an ultrasound. It's it it is shocking to people that one wouldn't have an ultrasound. Oh, and then there's the issue of, oh, this is huge. I mean, one of the real reasons why people have ultrasound is because they want to find out their baby's sex.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 2
That feeds into a whole enormous issue around gender socialization. I've read some fascinating studies, many, many studies that show that, and I mean, you don't need study to to recognize this anyway, but, you know, that that gendered socialization occurs well before birth and ultrasound actually plays an enormous part in that. As soon as a woman finds out that she's having a male or a female child, she actually relates to the child inside her body differently. She speaks to that child differently. She makes assumptions about the personality of that child based on the sex that has been deciphered via ultrasound. So I actually think that it's very, very pernicious in that sense as well. And I don't think that Well, this is also very interesting. I hear women say all the time that they didn't feel a connection to their baby until they saw it on the ultrasound screen. So that really mimics, how our culture is relating individuals to themselves, individuals to other people. I mean, our friendships are mediated through the screen. Our sexuality has a very unfortunate connection to the screen, and our babies in a way are made real when we see them on that ultrasound screen. And I just think it's it's a very interesting, commentary on our whole culture.
Speaker 1
And what's that that quote, If our babies were meant to be seen in pregnancy, our stomachs would have windows? Yeah. You know? I love that.
Speaker 2
There you go. And, also, I think that there's this idea that, you know, if we know about a potential problem beforehand, then, yes, there's this concept that we can, you know, prepare ourselves, prepare ourselves emotionally, that we can kind of gather a medical team together, but in a lot of these cases, what women are doing is setting themselves up for a birth process that's going to involve so many more negative interventions that are probably not even necessary. You know? I mean, a child you know, I have friends whose children were born with, you know, cleft lip and palate, and, you know, because they were made aware of this thanks to ultrasound, their birth processes involved so much paraphernalia and intervention that really wasn't actually even necessary in order to deal with that particular issue. But it so, yeah, I mean, for me, I I would definitely rather not know. But, yeah, it it certainly comes down to, you know, your personal philosophy and how you approach life in general.
Speaker 1
You know, I don't maybe you know more about it than I do, but I remember reading in the gentle birth, gentle mothering book, by Sarah Buckley, talking about how in America, ultrasound was getting introduced in the late eighties. And by the nineties, when regulations actually came around for technology that was being used in the hospitals, ultrasound had already become so normalized. It just got grandfathered in. And so Yeah. It's kinda interesting because, again, right, we're all going into this assumption. Well, we're not, but but the average person who hasn't really gotten too deep into this is assuming that their doctor's using evidence based care technology that's been proven safe and that all of this is increasing safety. Right? And that's, like, the big joke on this whole thing is it's not. And, you know, we're looked at as the irresponsible, you know, radical, you know, just atrocious people who are actually saying, I'm actually kinda gonna side with nature on this one. It's it it really is. It just comes down to a spiritual way of life. I mean, it's it's such a large you could just apply it to every aspect of how we live.
Speaker 2
It's very interesting. Yeah. I think that we just don't think very deeply about these issues. You know, I have noticed a shift in the past few years. There are more people, I think, who are questioning the safety of ultrasound, and yeah, I mean, it's interesting too to note that some large organizations The World Health Organization, there are some, I don't know if that's it exactly, but there are some large kind of international health organizations that have actually publicized, you know, guidelines suggesting that we actually scale back our use of ultrasound.
Speaker 1
It is. It's the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the FDA. There's, like, three massive organizations that all say, it should only be used when medically indicated of high risk situation. Right. Blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah. But that is gonna be used. Yeah. Go ahead.
Speaker 2
Right. Right. And that in and of itself, I mean, if this if the World Health Organization is saying something that even hints at going against, you know, conventional medical practice, you kind of want to investigate that, don't you? I mean, to me, that's a big, kind of red flag that there's something going on there that The incongruity between how individual doctors are presenting this technology and the apparent concern that these large, you know, health bodies have, again, there's something there that we need to be paying attention to, and I don't think enough people are.
Speaker 1
And that that was another part. I remember Sarah Buckley talking about in that book about how there aren't regulations around how to calibrate the ultrasound machines. And so it can be incredibly high or incredibly low, and, of course, someone could hear that and not even know what that means. And like we said at the beginning of the show, we hardly even understand what that means
Speaker 2
about that. I don't know what that means.
Speaker 1
That the calibration can be so high. Of course, it's gonna be hotter, I'm assuming. There's more heat, and so it could you know, but that that the point being that there aren't even regulations around this stuff
Speaker 2
that an ultrasound and women, sorry. Yeah. And and and and as an individual women, we don't have access to any of that. We go into the ultrasound room and we simply submit. I mean, it's a process of submission. We don't get any information about, you know, women are not told about the risks, women are not explained we're not given any explanation as to what kind of machine is being used, this, you know, the it just it's all And how how about this
Speaker 1
that women aren't that the ultrasound technicians aren't allowed to even say anything about what they're seeing to the woman and that whole drama that is so powerful.
Speaker 2
Bring that up in my podcast. I mentioned that specifically in in the podcast. And this is an enormous issue for me, actually. And that is that you will frequently hear midwives, midwives, women who should, who are supposedly charged with preserving the integrity of birth and protecting mothers and babies, midwives frequently make jokes about how babies clearly and actively move away from the ultrasound waves. And this is the doppler and the ultrasound. It's it's it's widely recognized in birth circles, and it's joked about. And people find it funny that when you put a doppler on a mother's abdomen, the baby is evidently moving and kicking and gesturing and sometimes jerking wildly clearly in order to avoid the sound waves. And I just I don't find it funny. And I think the fact that it is seen as a joke really betrays a profound lack of compassion and understanding and that frankly, it's abusive. It's abusive. I mean, all of these things that we've talked about in this conversation, each of them individually are a grave cause for concern and put together, I personally get a picture that, I can't have anything to do with it. And, you know, it's interesting, too, to look at who is promoting this technology and who are its detractors. The only people who are speaking out against ultrasound are independent birth workers and people who have absolutely no who receive who drive no benefit whatsoever. Like, I don't get paid for any of this. Like, I don't there's no incentive for me to talk about this. All I really get is told that I'm, you know, a nutcase. And the people who are promoting this and selling it as beneficial and, you know, encouraging women to engage with it, they have a vested interest in continuing the use of this technology, whether it's an economic interest or a liability reason or whatever it is.
Speaker 1
It runs so deep.
Speaker 2
It's so deep and it's so much interrelated with all these other issues. You know, we talked about induction, we talked about just the general necessity to control birthing women's behaviour. So much, rests on our submission to all of these systems taken together, and ultrasound is such a central part of it.
Speaker 1
Well, I'm excited to hear your three part episode coming up, three episodes about ultrasound where you're gonna break all this down in much greater detail. And it's important to get this out there because so few people are talking against this. And, you know, I I see the few people, you know, the few mothers even who publicly who have big platforms and publicly go against ultrasound just for themselves, are vilified so quickly. So, you know, it's why we are committed to having these conversations and, you know, for anyone listening who wants to continue the conversation, you know, please please reach out to us and find us on social media and and contribute to this conversation. It's it's ongoing and interesting and, needs to get said. So thank you for your time, and I love you very much.
Speaker 2
Thanks, Emily.
Speaker 1
That's it for today, everyone. Join us next week for another episode of the free birth podcast. Thanks for joining us, and remember, your body, your choice. Lots of love.
