Blog flamewar winds up in federal court

hi ReGina, I would advise you to be very careful with what you post online , it could be used against you in a court of law. ...

Go ahead and laugh Gina. Watch what you say. It's your inability to keep things shut that got you in this fix in the first place.

Gina, I find it ironic that you are all pissy about someone telling "stupid lies" about you, when you tell absurd lies with maximal hyperbole about Dr. Amy and others, and also allow your fans to spread falsehoods on venues that you keep on a very short leash. Considering that you and your admins are able to delete any kind of dissent swiftly from your pages, it'd be simple and easy to remove people spewing falsehoods that you very well know are untrue.

Also who have you retained as a lawyer now? The first lawyer, Kim Bilbrey, was a government-employed public defender who is not legally have any private practice. She wouldn't have been able to file the case that you claimed you were going to file. How embarrassing.

Then you bragged about having the bestest IP lawyer evar, and that person wound up being Jake Marcus, who is quite clearly no IP law expert. Anyone with half a brain realizes that you never had any kind of copyright claim against Dr. Amy, and I don't know why you're pushing your luck now.

Finally, everything you write reads as terse and hysterical. Whoops, I mean, TERSE and HYSTERICAL. Grow up, you're in your mid-thirties, try having a conversation with those that disagree with you in a style that doesn't scream "angry middle schooler".

That's what Gina wrote. Not that I have any trouble imagining why someone might remember it as shove it elsewhere. Interesting that Gina is having such a wonderful time being sued. That's not a normal reaction. Someone should take a screenshot of this in case she claims emotional distress.

I tried to do that but the link is messed up, or they hacked you. I clicked over but got a weird message saying Looks like you've been denied permission to see my website.

I was paraphrasing from memory, but you said something along those lines, and things far worse. What you said specifically is hard to prove now since you have edited your post to claim that the part where you told Dr. Amy to take that picture of you giving her the middle finger back to her blog somehow......wasn't actually telling her to take it back to her blog. The part where you told her to writhe around naked on the floor in printed words from your blog apparently still stands, as odd as it is.

As for reading up before making accusations, you may want to take your own advice. Let's see what kind of things you're accused Dr. Amy of:

1. You've accused her of not being a real doctor (hence the constant use of quotes around "Dr." when referencing her). She allowed her license to lapse after retiring from medicine to raise her four children, but she is still a doctor, can legally still call herself one, and can still legally practice medicine if she decided to reactivate her license. You don't lose your education and training when you retire.

2. You've accused her of posting a woman's address so her followers can attack. Not true. She posted a link to a coroner's report about a baby who died at a home birth due to what investigators described as extreme negligence on the part of the midwife (who was also responsible for the death of 5 other babies), and somewhere buried in the report was the address of the woman. Not the same thing.

3. You've accused her of being anti-vaginal birth and anti-breastfeeding. Not at all true. In fact, she has four children who were born vaginally and breastfed. What she is against is women being duped into giving birth while being cared for by incompetent CPMs like the one described above (lay midwives with high school diplomas and a certificate awarded after taking a few classes about what happens during birth. The certificate was created by other lay midwives to give to themselves so they could appear more legitimate and to compete with the similarly named CNMs, who have actual medical training and an a college education in nursing). The reason for her concern is also stated above - babies can die when their birth is handled by people with inadequate training. You've said as much yourself in your post about how after attending 20 births, you now realize how much training you really need to be a safe and competent birth attendant and how much can go wrong at birth. Though, oddly, you've also claimed multiple times that attending those 20 births as a doula gave you more training and insight than Dr. Amy despite her actually having delivered many hundreds of babies.

4. You've accused her of not completing her education beyond residency, which is false. She really was a doctor practising medicine for years.

5. You've accused her of having her blog pulled down a few days ago by her web host in response to your lawsuit. Actually, that instance was due to crashing from high traffic lately, which is why it is currently still up despite a few periods of inaccessibility. Your letters to her servers demanding they take it down due to alleged copyright infringement were illegal and abusive, and are the basis of the current lawsuit against you. They may have worked briefly a few weeks ago, but she was back up quickly and this lawsuit you are so quick to "ha ha" about is the result.

I could easily go on, but I think your own words can speak for themselves. It is disturbing that you would be so quick to laugh at a very serious and likely very expensive lawsuit. It is very sad that it came to this, but you were the first to try and sue her and I can't blame her for fighting back.

Must be hard, to not be able to delete dissenting comments about you Gina

Thiat is Gina, if you deign to allow us to read your blog.
You seem quite keen to block anyone who might disagree with you.

Gina, Gina, Gina, now YOU are lying.....anyone cannot just go to your website to see what you did or didn't say. Most of us who aren't sheeple will get some lame message about how we are all assholes and cannot be deemed worthy to see your royal blog since we don't kiss your ass and whatever words are spewing out of it......so Gina, who you crappin?
p.s. You really aren't stopping anybody from getting to your blog, since the people you are blocking really are smart enough to get around it. I've been blocked, and I am still able to view your site, not because I am interested in what you have to say, but just because I can. HAA HAA HAA

If you're a Firefox user, try this: http://goo.gl/axjnx

As a regular reader of Dr. Amy she spends a lot of time explaining the difference between CNMs and DEMs. She worked with CNMs and respects them very much. As you say, CNMs work mostly in hospitals but some attend homebirths. I know Dr. Amy isn't a fan of homebirth but she does defend the right of women to have the choice. It's my opinion that if US midwives all had a CNM or equivalent ( in Europe there are non nurse midwives that have extensive university education in midwifery ) there wouldn't be such fuel for debate.

In my state, there are many CNMs, but almost all of them practice in hospitals. It is hard to find a CNM who will do a homebirth. On the other hand, it is very easy to find a homebirth midwife who is NOT a CNM. My state allows anyone to practice as a midwife. I could be one. You could be one. After some horrible outcomes, a few politicians tried to tighten up the regulations to make things safer; they were accused of trying to deny women choice. To be fair, many states that really try to enforce medical training and accountability for birth attendants end up with underground midwives. Those are the ones who hide or take off before the paramedics show up, and ask their clients to pretend it was an unplanned out of hospital birth.

Other states take a very different view -- check out Oregon if you want to see what the wild, wild west of unregulated midwifery looks like.

These issues are STILL current. The Big Push for Midwives campaign is actively working to extend the ability of CPMS to practice in various states. Other pro-midwife groups are working to broaden insurance reimbursement for CPMs and the ability of CPMs to obtain Medicaid payments. Bills are still in front of various state legislatures dealing with the legality of midwifery practice. See, for example, the blog "Safer Midwifery for Michigan".

She left practicing medicine in 2003. It's all over the place on her blog and elsewhere. Just because her book was published in the early 1990s, it doesn't mean that's the last time she worked.

And you're dead wrong about home birth in Massachusetts. In most states, including this one, direct-entry midwifery operates completely outside the scope of the law. CNMs-- certified nurse midwives, NOT direct-entry midwives-- in most states are the ones who are prohibited from attending home birth at all, or who are allowed to attend home birth only with a cooperating/supervising OB and a hospital backup plan. Because of this restriction, there are very few CNMs who attend home births. The vast majority of home births in the US are attended by direct-entry midwives, who may or may not carry the CPM-- certified professional midwife-- credential. All you need to do is Google "CPMs Massachusetts" to get a long list of local homebirth midwives, none of whom have a nursing license.

You claim to be a practicing epidemiologist, and maybe you are, but you seem really, really uninformed about even basic terminology with regard to current birth practices.

MA is NOT one of those states. Massachusetts requires all CNMs to work under the supervision/cooperation of an OB, none of whom will agree to work with a homebirth midwife. As a result, CNMs in Massachusetts do not attend home births at all. ALL of them work in hospital settings.

Massachusetts, though, DOES have a large number of non-nurse direct-entry midwives (DEMs/lay midwives/CPMs) who attend nothing but home births. This isn't strictly against the law; rather, these midwives practice completely outside any legal oversight. Their services aren't covered by insurance, and there are no OBs working with them.

I'm a little surprised that someone who claims to be a practicing epidemiologist doesn't know even these basics about the circumstances surrounding birth attendants in MA. Dr. Amy, for example, repeatedly makes clear the differences between the types of midwives attending births at home and in the hospital.

Similarly, it doesn't take a lot of digging to find out that Dr. Amy was practicing until 2003, when she retired and let her license lapse. Just because her book was published in 1994 doesn't mean that's when she stopped practicing.

How do you explain how home birth, which has a dramticaly higher maternal and neonatal death rate than hospital birth, could possibly do anything to lower mortality and morbidity rate? Please read my explanation above about how infant mortality and perinatal mortality are two very different things, and how the fact that US has among the lowest perinatal mortality rates in the world means moms and babies are safer delivering here than nearly anywhere else, especially countries like the Netherlands where home birth is common. Did you know that in recent years home birth rates have fallen there in response to reports about how a low-risk woman delivering at home with a midwife is more likely to die or have her baby die than a high-risk woman delivering in a hospital with an MD? They were mistaken about the risks of home birth for many years, and you may be too.

If lowering rates of c-sections and maternal infections is your goal, there are effective ways to do that that don't involve home birth. My obstetrician has a success rate of 96% for women hoping to deliver vaginally. He does it by doing things like allowing moms ample time to deliver (36+ hours if baby is okay), encouraging letting labor start naturally, gently augmenting stalled labor, etc. We don't need home birth to fix the problems with birth in the US.

You stated earlier that you were too busy to read the research...are you just too busy to read research that contradicts what you want to believe?

Regarding infections in hospitals...hospitals haven't been dirty places for a good 100 years now. Not since the germ theory took root and doctors/nurses started washing their hands and disinfecting. There is no way a hospital is dirtier than the average household, especially one with pets or kids. And I've seen more than one homebirth on youtube where they gave birth in the bathroom or on the toilet. That's cleanliness?!

Also, you must not have heard of the woman in North Carolina or somewhere who acquired necrotizing fasciitis in her vagina after her homebirth midwife checked her without gloves on.

How do you explain, given the rareness of homebirth in the US (<1% of births, excluding the OMG BABY'S HEAD!!!! surprises), the lagging fetal and maternal morbidity and mortality outcomes compared to other developed countries?

Off the top of my head.....
-We don't have universal single-payer health care, which affects the other factors listed below
-We have great income disparity in this country; poorer women have less access to good treatment over the course of their pregnancies
-We have higher obesity rates

How do you explain this in terms of home birth, despite much higher prevalence of midwifery and home birth (and, now, some indication that outcomes might be improved with clinic births) in other developed countries.

You're an epidemiologist? Surely you have heard of coufounding factors and the principle that correlation does not imply causation?

You're also not being specific. Which outcomes? Lower cesarean rates, even though the WHO retracted their recommended 10-15% and admitted it wasn't backed by evidence? And which other developed countries? Some have higher rates of home birth, some don't. Most other western industrialized developed nations are located in western Europe, which is far more densely settled, implying that that more women live closer to a hospital. Further midwives in these countries have education and training more on par with what American CNMs have. The midwives that attend home births in the US wouldn't be allowed to practice in France or the Netherlands.

Also, are you aware of the rates of hospital acquired infections for women and neonates in US hospital settings? The kind of damage those can cause - including death and brain damage to infants? Infection rates as high as 30% in women who deliver by c-section, which can be as much as 1/3 of births in some areas?

Of course those are important issues. But you're leaving out a few important numbers. How many deaths and instances of brain damage are cause each year by hospital-acquired infections? Is that number higher or lower than the number of deaths and instances of brain damage among home births. More importantly, is that RATE higher or lower? "Can be as high as....in some places" is not universal, for starters, and an "infection" can encompass everything from a minor rash that resolves on its own to NEC or MRSA. Without specifics, it's just a rhetorical device.

I'm not a cheerleader for Dr. Amy-- I'm pretty earthy-crunchy myself. But from my years associating with other natural-minded moms in LLL and similar groups, my experience has been that while Dr. Amy does cherry-pick when criticizing the excesses of the natural parenting community, the fact is those women exist and are a vocal and not-very-nice presence on and offline, and they DO drown out dissenters, and they DO encourage dangerous practices like home and unassisted VBACs and breech births.

Finally, you're complaining that Dr. Amy isn't focusing on more important issues. But neither are you-- instead, you're spending time on a comments thread criticizing her.

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