FFP 624 | Is Hospital Birth Really Safer? | Dr. Stuart Fischbein, MD
Fertility Friday | Fertility Awareness Mastery for Women's Health Professionals
Fertility Friday Radio | Fertility Awareness for Pregnancy and Hormone-free birth control
4.8 • 869 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2026
⏱️ 85 minutes
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Summary
In this episode, Lisa sits down with Stuart James Fischbein, MD — obstetrician, homebirth physician, and host of the Birthing Instincts Podcast — to examine one of the most consequential questions in modern maternity care: is hospital birth actually safer? Dr. Fischbein draws on more than 40 years of obstetric experience to trace how the medical model came to frame pregnancy as a high-risk condition requiring active management, and how that framing has shaped the interventions women encounter today. The conversation explores the steep rise in cesarean section rates, induction rates, and NICU admissions since the 1970s — alongside the sobering reality that maternal and neonatal outcomes have not improved commensurately.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's officially here. Early Bird registration for our fertility awareness mastery mentorship program is officially open. |
| 0:09.3 | We officially start on the 13th of May, but early bird registration is only open for a short time. |
| 0:17.3 | As a woman's health professional, you already know that you're seeing an increasing |
| 0:21.5 | number of clients come to you asking about their menstrual cycle, asking about charting. |
| 0:27.1 | Some of them may already be tracking their cycles in one way or another. And even if you have |
| 0:33.0 | personal charting experience, if you have any clients who are sharing their charts with you, you've |
| 0:38.2 | already discovered that most of the charts your clients share with you look nothing like yours. |
| 0:43.9 | And your training certainly hasn't prepared you to support clients who have abnormal cycles |
| 0:49.4 | and complex charts. That's exactly what we do in FAM. |
| 0:59.4 | We teach our practitioners to interpret even the most complex menstrual cycle charts and confidently guide your clients through their hormonal and reproductive health challenges |
| 1:04.5 | using our evidence-based strategies and practitioner-facing protocols. |
| 1:10.4 | Head over to fertility friday.com slash VAMLive to apply today. |
| 1:15.7 | That's fertility friday.com slash f-a-m-m-l-I-V-E. |
| 1:20.7 | This is the Fertility Friday podcast, episode number 624. |
| 1:37.5 | Okay. episode number 624. In today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Stuart Fishbein, a board-certified OBGYN who spent 40 years in practice, the last decade and a half of which he attended |
| 1:44.0 | births at home in a city where |
| 1:46.9 | almost no other physicians did that. In this fascinating conversation, we get to hear how Dr. Fishbein |
| 1:56.7 | went from the conventional medical model of birth to really understanding a different way to |
| 2:06.6 | bring babies into the world, influenced by midwifery care and really how the birthing process |
| 2:14.3 | unfolds. As a mom of three who birthed all three of my children at home, |
| 2:19.9 | this conversation really hits home for me. It really highlights the limits of our conventional |
| 2:26.6 | system and really opens up the conversation about birth and what it should truly look like. Despite the fact that our conventional |
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