WN TBD: Did the Internet Doom a Pregnancy?
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2020
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
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For pregnant women in the U.S., there are plenty of reasons to mistrust the medical establishment. Mortality rates are high compared to other western countries, and one-third of women in the U.S. give birth by C-section. It’s no wonder that many women turn to the internet for alternatives.
This week, the story of one woman who was drawn into a network of private Facebook groups dedicated to the idea of ‘freebirth,’ or unassisted birth. And what happens when the misinformation shared in these private groups has real-life consequences.
Guest: Brandy Zadrozny, reporter for NBC News. You can read her reporting on ‘freebirth’ here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Slate listeners. Do us a favor and help us make a better slate by answering our survey. It'll only take a few minutes. You can find it at slate.com slash survey. |
| 0:11.3 | Hey, everyone. Just a heads up. This episode deals with some heavy topics around childbirth and misinformation. Okay, here's the show. |
| 0:26.9 | Brandy Zedrosny is a reporter for NBC News. |
| 0:31.1 | She covers internet culture and writes a lot about online communities. |
| 0:46.7 | In particular, communities where misinformation about health care spreads, groups for anti-vaxxers, groups for people who are really, really afraid of parasites, people looking for a place to share what they've heard and what they're frightened of. |
| 0:53.3 | We think a lot about misinformation and disinformation in terms of political thought, right? |
| 1:01.1 | But when you look at medical misinformation from fake cancer products to, you know, fake autism, |
| 1:06.3 | cures and all of it, those eclipse, like fake political news. |
| 1:11.0 | And when you have the medical model that we have now where you can hardly get into see your doctor, many of us aren't insured, things are expensive. |
| 1:15.2 | The place you're going to turn to is the internet. |
| 1:21.9 | Many of these people look to private Facebook groups for answers. |
| 1:26.5 | And in one of those groups, which was focused on |
| 1:29.1 | unassisted birth, Brandy started to see posts from a woman named Judith. So I met Judith in |
| 1:36.2 | February of last year. And I met her because I belong to a lot of these sort of strange, |
| 1:45.2 | fringy groups. |
| 1:48.9 | Judith was 28, and she grew up on the Pacific Coast. |
| 1:54.4 | Like a lot of the other women in the group, she wanted to give birth without a doctor or a midwife, |
| 1:56.8 | something that's known as a free birth. |
| 1:59.6 | How did Judith get interested in a free birth? |
| 2:18.0 | So Judith, she actually heard about the term. She's sort of a crunchy person, a hippie person. And so she heard about the term from a friend who said, you know, I did this decades ago on my own. And it was beautiful and lovely. And she said, wow, that's amazing. And then she googled unassisted birth birth alone eventually her search led her to a group called the free birth |
| 2:23.8 | society which is a business they have a blog they have online courses so she found them bought |
| 2:29.4 | their course watched their online videos and more than anything listen to their podcasts, which they have some 70 episodes now. |
... |
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