Ep 213: The Corrupted World of Medicalized Birth with Dr. Stu Fischbein
The Way Forward with Alec Zeck
Alec Zeck
4.8 • 968 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 180 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Click here to get an exclusive discount to our Birthing Instincts Podcast Patreon membership. Use promo code ALECZECK50 for half off your first month, excluding our Medical Professionals Level. This Patreon is a great way to get additional content and support from Dr. Stu and the entire Birthing Instincts family.
No animal in nature needs to be taught how to give birth. So why have we convinced human mothers they do?
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Stu Fischbein, an obstetrician who spent more than two decades attending hospital births before stepping outside the system to examine it more closely. After years working in highly structured medical environments, he began asking a difficult question: why hasn’t more intervention led to better outcomes?
Modern approaches to birth and healthcare have drifted from basic human biology, and how fear, liability, and protocol often replace judgment and trust. This isn’t a debate about extremes—it’s a grounded look at how medical intervention, when applied by default, can create cycles that are hard to escape.
We also touch on trusting your body, the loss of autonomy in healthcare, and why outcomes haven’t meaningfully improved despite more technology, more testing, and more control. The patterns we unpack here don’t stop with medicine—they show up anywhere systems replace thinking.
You’ll Learn:
[00:00] Introduction
[01:43] How birth was medicalized through vilifying midwives and destroying natural practices
[12:25] The takeover of obstetrics training and the relegation of OB-GYNs to gatekeepers, while outcomes worsened
[18:29] Dr. Stu’s shift from classical training to questioning everything
[33:33] Why we need to educate 13-15 year old women about their bodies
[45:42] How and why the NICU admission rates have doubled
[01:03:37] Why for-profit hospitals can't financially survive if women who don't need medical intervention go elsewhere
[01:30:38] How doctors manipulate women using relative risk instead of actual risk
[01:52:25] How to retrain the obstetrical system starting with medical schools
[02:26:09] Why treating 99.9% of GBS-positive women with antibiotics destroys babies' microbiomes
[02:36:12] Why routine pap smears and mammograms are mostly unnecessary
[02:45:25] Why nature designed women to give birth alone in safe spaces
Resources Mentioned:
Midwife books by Sara Wickham | Website
Breech Without Borders | Website
Find more from Dr. Stu:
Birthing Instincts | Website
Birthing Instincts | Instagram
Birthing Instincts | Podcast
Find more from Alec:
Alec Zeck | Instagram
Alec Zeck | X
The Way Forward | Instagram
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I did C-sections on women that didn't need C-sections. I probably cut hundreds of episiotomy's that were unnecessary. It's all I knew. They made pregnancy into an illness that needed to be treated or managed as opposed to something that is natural by design. They don't care that they're exposing the woman to more tests, more fear, more anxiety. Doesn't matter, it's generating a ton of revenue.itals and health care system do not care about your health. They care about making a profit and keeping their doors open. And if you happen to get healthy besides, that's fine. They're going to do whatever they can to fearmonger and trash home birthing to instill the fear of God back into women to pull them back in. When there's a bad outcome from a homebirth, they blame the homebirth. When there's a bad outcome from homebirth, they blame the home birth. |
| 0:38.8 | When there's a bad outcome in the hospital, they blame birth. They don't blame the hospital. Yet many babies that end up in the NICU came into the hospital inside their moms in perfectly healthy condition. Dr. Stu, thank you so much for joining me. Alec, thank you for having me. It's always an honor to have an opportunity to speak to an audience who I might not |
| 0:56.4 | otherwise reach to talk about this topic, which I'm so passionate about. |
| 1:00.8 | You know, before we started recording when I was getting ready for this episode, I just |
| 1:05.8 | did a cursory Google search of common birth interventions. |
| 1:12.4 | And obviously, Potocin, epidurals, |
| 1:16.2 | cord clamping. |
| 1:17.7 | Those are low-hanging fruit that most people realize. |
| 1:21.2 | But I really looked into it before we started recording. |
| 1:25.1 | Like, the list is incredibly long. |
| 1:27.8 | Like you don't realize how many interventions are involved in a typical hospital |
| 1:34.0 | birth these days. |
| 1:35.0 | And it's just wild to reflect on how far from nature we've wondered in a variety of ways |
| 1:43.2 | in life. |
| 1:44.1 | But birth being your entry into this realm |
| 1:47.3 | has arguably event-based the most interventions of anything else that we do in this life, |
| 1:55.5 | which is, which is wild. |
| 1:56.5 | Like, that's your entry into this life and you're just being bombarded with stuff and |
| 2:00.7 | the overwhelming |
| 2:01.5 | majority of birthing experiences across the world these days. Yeah. And most women who who give birth |
| 2:07.3 | these days, if they have asked to reflect on it, are not happy about the way they went. They're |
| 2:12.9 | not happy about the process. They love their babies and they love being pregnant, but they didn't really |
... |
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