The Wax Paper: Apples and Oranges
Home Birth Science or Propaganda?
Download the PDFs at the bottom of this page to effectively address the Wax Paper as it rears its opaque head at a Statehouse in a legislative session near you!
Studies, like the Wax Paper, that include high-risk ACCIDENTAL out-of-hospital births are going to show worse outcomes than studies that exclusively evaluate low-risk PLANNED out of hospital births with a skilled midwife. These more relevant studies show no difference in risk to the baby.
If someone tells you about a study that shows higher rates of deaths for babies born at home please, ask them if they are comparing APPLES to ORANGES.
Specifically:
1. Does the data in this study include ACCIDENTAL out-of-hospital birth?
2. Why should that make me oppose PLANNED out-of-hospital births with midwives?
3. Doesn’t this study really mean that I SHOULD support this bill, to make sure women PLANNING out-of-hospital births have access to midwives?
4. Why try to trick me by mixing apples and oranges without telling me about the oranges?
Don’t be fooled by BAD SCIENCE that compares APPLES to ORANGES.
Read Betty-Anne Daviss and Kenneth C. Johnson’s call for withdrawal of The Wax Paper.
Read Amy Romano’s Science & Sensibility post to see the junk meta-analysis of The Wax Paper.
Read Time Magazine’s in-depth article about home birth in America and The Wax Paper.
Read Our Bodies, Ourselves blog post with a letter to the editor at Time about The Wax Paper.
Read Jennifer Block’s piece in The Daily Beast about The Wax Paper.
Read The Unnecesarean.com and the discussion by the Editor of the Lancet of The Wax Paper.
Read Dr. Kathryn Clancy, Asst. Professor of Anthropology at the Univ. of IL research blog.
Read The UK’s National Childbirth Trust critique of the junk meta-analysis of The Wax Paper.
Read Commentary as published in Birth, Issues in Perinatal Care – Dec, 2010 on The Wax Paper.
Download Additional Information
- 1-21-2011 PushNews RELEASE_Docs Use Junk Science to Oppose Home Birth
- Wax Paper One-pager
Pushers! Download this handy PDF one-pager and share with your state lawmakers when ACOG and your state’s Big Medicine Lobby start trying to cloud the issue of planned home birth with all this Wax Paper. Good thing is, we Pushers can see right through to the truth about this bad science. - Wax Paper Postcard – 4 up
Pushers! Download this handy PDF postcard for state lawmaker mailings. (It’s a 4-up doc for easy printing!) Want to do more? Get in touch with folks in the know on the ground in your PushState today.
