Let’s end the fear-mongering, ignorance, and flat out nonsense floating around out there around women’s health, fertility, pregnancy, and birth shall we? In this provocative episode with maverick OB-GYN Dr. Stu Fischbein, MD, there’s no question a few feathers might be ruffled. When it comes to empowering women to make excellent choices for themselves, their babies, and their families, there’s no better reason to do so. Check out Dr. Stu’s podcast, Birthing Instincts and follow him on Instagram @birthinginstincts.

Transcript:

Hey Gorgeous, if you want success on your fertility journey, you’ve got to have the mindset for it. It’s time to kick fear, negativity, doubt, shame, jealousy, and the whole clown car of low vibe fertility journey BS to the curb. I’m your host, Roseanne Austin, Fertility Mindset Master. Former prosecutor and recovering type A control freak perfectionist.

I use the power of mindset to get pregnant naturally and have my baby boy at 43, despite years of fertility treatment failure. I help women across the globe beat the odds on their fertility journey just like I did. Get ready for a quick hit of confidence, joy, feminine badassery, and loads of hell yes for your fertility journey.

It’s time to get fearless baby, fearlessly fertile. Let’s do this. Welcome to the Fearlessly Fertile Podcast, episode 257, Taking the Fear Out of Birth and Baby Making with Dr. Stuart Fishbein, M. D. I am so excited to be inviting you to today’s episode because we are going to be having a very disruptive, awesome, fun, and Challenging the narrative conversation with Dr. Stuart Fishbein, obstetrician, maverick, proponent of home birth, taking the fear out of birthing, labor, women’s health. I mean, this is going to be a conversation that is unquestionably going to be shaking up some of the standard narrative. And, and that’s why I want to invite you as we start this episode to open your mind and open your heart.

Unquestionably, we are going to be talking about things that might make you go, GASP, but here’s the thing. You get to think for yourself. It’s something that I encourage women to do all the time. If you wanted to get average, readily available, you know, basic narrative information, you can just go to mainstream media for that.

You can just listen to what the crowd says. But if you find yourself really questioning things on your fertility journey and wanting to open your mind and open your heart to other possibilities and truly give yourself a chance to cover your bases, you’re going to listen to this conversation with an open heart.

And I can guarantee you’re not going to agree with everything. And you know what? That’s your freaking right. You are a sentient, intelligent, amazing woman. And two things can be true at the same time. You can have your belief system. Other people can have theirs. And that doesn’t mean someone is more right than someone else.

So as we get this conversation started, I really encourage you to where you might get triggered in this conversation. Just check in with yourself, just check in with yourself. And before you flat out reject it, think about the context and think about what, where I’m coming from as somebody who loves you and make sure that you have information.

I didn’t have that. I wish more women had and that everything about this is empowerment and empowerment comes from your ability to assess all of the facts and the ones that work for you run with them. The ones that don’t disregard them. Okay, because in order for you to be truly the best advocate for yourself, your fertility, and your family, you gotta have all the information.

You can’t give informed consent without information, okay? And as we know, I mean, this isn’t, this isn’t rocket science. A ton of the information that we have received over the past few years is proving to be, well, I don’t know, different than what we were originally told. And my commitment over the next 10 years is that there are 100, 000 fearlessly fertile babies that come into the world.

Completely free of propaganda, nonsense, and fear. And the sooner that we are willing to engage in a conversation that doesn’t make other people wrong for having different opinions, the freer we all become. So, I want you to be fearless, and I want you to be fertile. So, enjoy this really powerful, in depth conversation with someone that I really love and respect, Dr.

Stuart Fishbein. Enjoy. Well, I’m super stoked to have you on, Dr. Fishbein, so I would love it if you would introduce yourself to the Fearlessly Fertile audience and share a little bit about your specialty and how you got involved in medicine. Rosanna, thanks for having me on. I love the title of your group, Fearlessly Fertile, because I, Fear is just such an adverse motivating factor for all of us, so obviously it does some good in how we live our lives, but to live completely in fear is just not, uh, a way for human beings to survive and live a happy life.

I am an obstetrician gynecologist, and since I don’t know your audience very well, I’ll sort of start back at the beginning. I grew up in Minnesota. I went to the University of Minnesota undergrad. I never really wanted to be a physician, but I was in my third year of undergrad in the College of Biological Sciences at Minnesota, and a lot of my friends were going pre med, and so I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it, and that’s, so I wasn’t one of those people that woke up with a calling because I’d seen something when I was six years old or something.

I just was meandering through college like a lot of us do, because that’s what everybody did after high school, and so I did my pre med stuff, and I got into medical school at the University of Minnesota. And then what happens in medical school is first two years are pretty much all classroom and laboratory and anatomy and that sort of thing.

And the last two years are all rotations where you spend three to six weeks on a certain service. Could be internal medicine, could be dermatology, neurology, OBGYN, family practice, whatever. And so you have to at the end of your third year when you really don’t know anything. Because you’re, you know, but you are naive, but you are also enthusiastic.

You have to make a choice that’s going to affect you for the rest of your life. It’s a very tough place to be. And so you start doing rotations in your third year. And what I did was I was doing all the general rotations like internal medicine, neurology, pediatrics, and I came off one called hematology oncology, which was a cancer dealing and it was a pediatric hematology oncology.

And it was actually quite sort of depressing for me. And my next rotation was OBGYN and instead of being up at three in the morning pushing chemotherapy or dealing with a kid with a seizure or something, I was catching a baby. And I just thought that this was the greatest thing. And of course, you’re, as I said, you’re naive.

You don’t understand the liability, the hours, the costs of doing something. You do something because you really love it. And I really wanted to do longitudinal care and longitudinal care is care where you take care of somebody for their life. So there’s internal medicine, there’s family practice, and OBGYN are pretty much the only specialties that do longitudinal care.

Everything else is like an ER physician, or a pathologist, or even a dermatologist, you see somebody for something, and then you don’t see them again. General surgery, that sort of thing. So, this specialty had an appeal for me. And I, again, I didn’t think about all the downsides of it. And so you have to then apply to residency programs at a time when you really don’t know anything.

And so it’s more about where do I want to live in the country? Then, you know, what program do I want to, where do I want to end up anything like that? And, and I ended up matching in Southern California at Cedars Sinai medical center in Los Angeles, which is a really good hospital as hospitals go, and we’ll hear more about that as we go through the hour today.

And I went through four years of medicalized birth training and I, and I was lucky because part of our training, we spent four months at L. A. County U. S. C. Hospital in downtown Los Angeles and it was the busiest hospital country in those days. They were doing about 22, 000 births a year, which is about 65 babies a day.

And so we got really good training. We learned about breeches and twins and they were just considered variations of normal and we saw a lot of pathology there and I came out of residency very medicalized thinking that I was very smart. I was the administrative chief resident in my fourth year of residency and so, you know, I got house officer awards and all those sorts of things and I am going along that path and I came out and I was that very medicalized doctor that sometimes I tend to feel sorry for and mock sometimes because they’ve not been enlightened.

And I was the one wearing the full hazmat suit, catching your baby while you were in lithotomy position with after prepping your vagina with betadine and covering you with sterile drapes. And the baby would come out and I would hold the baby in one hand and cut the cord immediately and then show you this beautiful thing that you just created.

Then walk it across the room and set it down in the warmer. And I thought that this was normal because this was all we ever saw. And this is all we ever did. And of course, you only know what you know, and you don’t understand. No no vision beyond your line of sight but i was fortunate because when i came out it was a different world and i was building my own practice i didn’t get a job working for a large corporation like kaiser foundation southern california or some major hmo and so i had to hustle to build a practice and so i covered emergency rooms and i covered free clinics.

And I was approached by some midwives to take their home birth transports and I said, sure, you know, I’ve said this a thousand times. I didn’t say sure, because I thought midwifery and home birth was a good idea. I’m quite certain if I remember vaguely that I probably thought it was really stupid, but it was a way to generate revenue for myself because I was a mercenary.

I was trying to make money. Probably one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me was doing that because I began to be reeducated. I began, I got to spend a lot of time with the midwives when they brought their patients to the hospital and we were just sitting around waiting. And they began to tell me a different way of doing things.

And I saw that their patients were quite well educated. And we began to call them clients. We don’t call them patients anymore because they’re not sick. They have a normal biological function that’s going on with their body and, and sometimes it goes awry and that’s where medical intervention is necessary.

But most of the time it’s not. And I began to learn that about 80 percent of what I knew, it didn’t apply to, you know, 85 percent of pregnant women because there’s nothing wrong with them. I was an expert in problems and most pregnant women didn’t have problems. So if you, you know, if you’re a hammer, everything you see is a nail.

So if all you know is medical problems, then you’re looking for medical problems in every single pregnant woman. And I began to realize that that’s not the way it was. And so I started a collaborative practice with two midwives. In the hospital setting because I was still certainly not thinking about working outside the hospital and we had really good results.

We were together for 15 years and we had a 7 percent c section rate and midwives took care of all the normal stuff. Like the pap smears, the annual exams, the well woman exams, the uh, the routine OB visits, the postpartum care, and I would come in when there was a problem, somebody had abnormal pap smear, needed a colposcopy or biopsy, someone had an ectopic pregnancy, they needed surgery, somebody had a breech baby or needed a c section or a vacuum or forceps, these are the things that I would do, and so I found that to be a really good form of medicine, however, I don’t even want to call it medicine because it really isn’t medicine, a good form of care, I should say.

However, we were never accepted in the community because we were always doing things that made the rest of the community uncomfortable because they had 30 percent c section rates and we had a 7 percent c section rate and we had assisting breach delivery and they were sectioning all breaches and I was doing laparoscopic surgery and they were doing open laparotomy surgery and.

So we were always picked on by the good old boys, which many community hospitals still have is a network of physicians who have run the hospital for a very long time, or they’ve been managing the department for a very long time, and they don’t like outcome. They don’t like outsiders coming in and telling them that there’s new things to do and how they’re doing.

It looks bad. So they began to pick on us from the very first day we started there. They did things that were unethical. And over time, it became a point where they finally decided that they weren’t going to renew our privileges. They banned the midwives, they banned VBAC, they banned breech delivery, not because of bad outcomes, but because it made the anesthesia department, the pediatric department nervous.

And so I had a choice of fighting them legally or leaving the hospital system and going to do home birth. And I was still very nervous, even after 25 years now of backing midwives, I had never been to a home birth. And I decided to do that because I was actually convinced by my patients who were due after the date that my privileges were no longer going to be renewed.

And they can, they have the right to do that. It’s their hospital. They can choose who they have. And again, they can’t discriminate and you can sue them, but it’s a long drawn out process. And nobody wins in this process like that. So I had smart advising people tell me to leave the hospital and go do home birthing.

And, and then for the last 12, 13 years, that’s what I’ve done. And it’s been a remarkable shift in my mentality and my Energy and my excitement for for what I do. I’ve gotten older, so that’s slowed me down a little bit, but I published several papers on twin birthing breach birthing case reports to let people know that this is a reasonable choice for women and their families to look at all the alternatives.

And you can’t Make an informed decision and really, it’s really about that without proper information and you should never be funneled down a path using fear or coercion and certainly pretty much every day in every doctor’s office and every hospital. The basic tenants of medical ethics are violated every day.

I’m not talking about personal bias. Roseanne, I’m talking about, you know, ethical. Violations. Everybody has bias. The key is to admit that you have a bias. Most of my colleagues in the medical world don’t admit they have a bias. They think their way is the only way of doing something and anybody doing it differently is crazy.

And that’s just a form of coping with cognitive dissonance. So we’ll get into that. I’m sure that’s a long winded introduction. But it really is important for people to understand that I’ve lived in both worlds. So I have a unique perspective of somebody who’s not just a hospital based doctor criticizing home birth or home birth midwife that’s saying every time I go to the hospital, they treat my patients like crap.

You know, I’ve lived in both worlds. And so I can see the problems Yeah. Hopefully more clearly than a lot of other people can. Well, and that’s why I wanted you on Dr. Fishbein because I saw some of your videos on Instagram and I was just like immediately sucked in because when I was struggling with fertility and when I ended up.

Getting pregnant naturally at almost 44 the minute I went in to see the OBGYN that would eventually deliver my son. It was fear. It was like, whoa, how old are you like get in here now, take 10 vials of blood, you know, ultrasound me like from every direction and, and instead of it being a moment that was like, oh my gosh, this is this amazing miracle, like after seven years of fertility treatment that was failing and treatment at a top 10 teaching hospital, it was not a celebration, it went immediately into this woman is high risk, you.

You need to be in here on X, Y, Z days, and I didn’t have any fear up to that point, Dr. Fishbein. It’s only when I went to the doctor to confirm my pregnancy and all that stuff that I wasn’t all afraid because I figured here, here was my thought process. After seven years of treatment, this boy decided to come naturally.

He’s fine. Like, that’s literally what was going on in my head, but the minute I walked through, To see the high risk specialist, it was like, game on, we need to be afraid, do this, like, just pretty much hand my pregnancy over. Yeah, that’s the model by which they’re trained in, and the reason that so many American women, let’s just stick with America today, there’s so many American women that fear birth is not because they’re innately designed to fear birth.

It’s because the society at whole, the culture, the television shows, the movies, the doctors that you see, they all fear birth and then they project that fear out into the world. And so, you know, whether it’s your mother, your mother in law or somebody else, they always want to tell about their story because they trusted their doctor and their doctor said, Oh 40 weeks is really dangerous.

And they use terms like really dangerous or high risk. And if you ever sit down and ask them, so what is, what is high risk mean? They don’t know. They’ll say it’s just really risky. And they’ll say, well, how risky? And they’ll say, very risky. And then say, well, what’s the number? And they don’t give you actual risk.

They give you relative risk and you can skew anybody by using fear. As we talked, I talked about earlier to get them down a path that you want them to take, and this is the only path that they know. So every woman who’s over 35, and by the way, 35 is a bogus number. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s completely, it was a completely made up number.

It had nothing to do with. The science behind it, I mean, you’re telling me that somebody who’s 34 years old in 11 months is okay, but suddenly they turn 35 and they’re not okay, but this is sort of the mentality that they’re stuck in and you know, I feel for my colleagues because they’re stuck in this hamster wheel and they’re stuck on an algorithm and every woman who falls into some label or some category will be put on an algorithm and even though the whole mentality of the obstetrical world is about them.

Yeah. Pregnancy as risk. I mean, my own college, the American College of OBGYN, who I have a lot of disagreements with some of their academic stuff is actually pretty good, but but their policy making is based on the idea that they say this. They say that pregnancy itself is a high risk condition. So that’s how they view everything through that prism and everything about it.

And so when you go to the doctor, you are started with a problem list. If you look at any, look at their paperwork, it’ll have at the top, it’ll say problem list. Doesn’t say diagnosis list or something. It says problem list already framing the way things are looked at. And the number one problem for every pregnant woman is what?

That she’s pregnant. That’s the number one problem and that’s not a way to think about it and this was highlighted for me once in my office after 30 some years of practicing and maybe eight or nine years already doing home birth. I had a woman come in. I wish I remembered her name because she did a great credit and I was taking her history.

And when you take a history, you ask them about their chief complaint. Why are you here? And then you ask questions about that. Then you ask about past medical history, past surgical history, family history, review of systems. And that’s how sort of a history is taken meds and allergies, that sort of thing.

So when somebody comes to see me, their chief complaint, again, just think of the, think of the language there is that she’s pregnant and she’s looking for options. So when I got to past medical history, this woman had no problem. She was just coming in because she wanted the idea of a home birth with an OB.

I got to past medical history and I said to her, so you have any other medical problems, which is how it rolls off the tongue of every physician always. And she looks at me and she goes, what’s the first one? And I’m thinking to myself, do you have any other medical problems? So I’m already, even me, the home birth.

Doctor person is still using language that implies that the very first problem she has is that she’s pregnant and that’s not the case and that’s one of the things about the midwifery model of care that’s so valuable is they don’t consider you a patient they consider you a client you’re only a patient if you get sick and i really want to make it clear for listeners that the midwifery model of care is a model of care it doesn’t mean that all midwives practice midwifery is a model of care That kind of care, some of them have practiced a very medicalized version of care, and there are some obese that practice a very relaxed midwifery kind of care, but it’s a, it’s the style of care, it’s giving people more time, it’s listening, it’s shared decision making, it’s going through all options, and you cannot have a midwifery style practice in the current medical model because there isn’t time because of the economics Of the situation, doctors have to do volume.

And when you do volume, you cannot give the kind of care that a woman deserves when she’s pregnant. It’s not the same as coming in because you have a rash on your elbow and you need five minutes to talk about your rash on your elbow. This is a life event, which has all kinds of questions. And the woman has all kinds of psychological and life.

History that is unique, that’s independent and when we put people on an algorithm, we can’t cater to their independence and that’s where you end up with this whole thing that everyone over 35 needs this or everyone who, you know, has this on an ultrasound needs to have this, this test, this, this test, this test, this test.

And so we’ll get to that. We’ll get down the road to that as you go. I don’t want to, I don’t want to get too far over my skis because I know you have lots of questions. Yeah. Well, I mean, and I would love to get your insight because So many of the women listening that are struggling with fertility, like we all wait for this day, this happy day when by hook or by crook, we get this positive pregnancy test and you know, the first thing we’re hit with is all of these statistics were hit with, Oh, what are you going to do now?

You know, we got to wait to see if this pregnancy is viable till 10 weeks. Like it’s, it seems very impersonal and as you say, medicalized. So. What would you, I mean, as an OB GYN, like, it would seem to me that you have some ideas about how you would approach a woman who has the unique situation of having struggled with fertility and now she’s pregnant.

Like, what would Dr. Fishbein do? Would you, you know, it would be awesome to hear your opinion on that. Okay, so again, let’s back up for just a second and I want to, I want to finish with what I said about risk. Just because something is, has risk, does not make it high risk. Okay. Life in itself is hot, is risky.

Every day you get out of bed, there’s a chance you won’t make it to the evening. That’s just, that’s just the way life is. But we wouldn’t say that life is high risk or some people might, but that’s then they’ve got a real problem if they think that way, they’re stressing themselves all day long and that’s not a great way to live.

But fertility is a really interesting thing because people think that, oh, suddenly when you get into your mid thirties or late thirties or whatever else that it’s over. And yet you’ve been taught since you were a little girl in the modern feminist era that you can have it all baby and you need to have a career and you need to compete with men and you need to be out in the workplace and you can delay childbearing and you can freeze your eggs and you can do all this stuff and then it turns around that suddenly you’re 40 years old and you don’t have a partner and you don’t, you know, you’re very successful in your career, but is that really where you want to be?

So again, we’ve been culturally brainwashed. Yeah. To believe, to forget biology. So let’s talk a little bit of biology and about, about fertility. So the term that is used when we talk about the ability of a female mammal to conceive in any given cycle is called fecundity. And the fecundity of a rabbit is about 99%.

In other words, every time they’re in heat, they get pregnant, but that’s because they are, uh, uh, you know, they’re a prey species. They’re not a predator species. Um, the higher up on the food chain, you are the less successful you are at getting pregnant in any given cycle. And it makes perfect sense.

Nature isn’t stupid. Nature designs things in a way. And if we just stop for a second and back up and just understand that. We would probably all be better off. So the fecundity of a, of a college student who’s 22 years old in any given cycle is only the conception rate is only between 20 and 25%, but let’s just say for easy math, it’s 20%.

So that means if you have 80 college women having unprotected sex every month. Only 20 are going to get pregnant. You ask college women who have unprojected sex, but they, they think they’re going to think it’s much higher than that, right? And so after the second month of the remaining 80, 20 percent more will get pregnant.

So now you have 16 more. So now you have 36 pregnant. And 64 not pregnant another month goes by and now you have 13 more or 20 percent of the 64. And so now you’re at 49 percent pregnant at 51 percent not pregnant. So even after three months of unprotected sex in the most fertile group of women we have in, in, in our country, over 50 percent of them will not be pregnant.

So to think that you want to conceive and you should, it should happen right away is it sort of an irrational thought born of. Not being well, well, you know, educated or being told wrong things by your high school biology teacher or whatever it is who told you, who told you these things. So, and then remember of the, of the 49 percent who got pregnant in the first three months, 20 percent of those are even higher nowadays because of certain environmental factors are going to miscarry and then they have to go back around and thrown back into the other group.

So we’re not like rabbits. We don’t, we aren’t as rabbits, nor should we be, or we, or we’d be. a planet. I mean, we have 8 billion people on the planet as it is. We would have, we would do ourselves over in a few generations. It would be done. So not getting pregnant right away is normal. It’s the norm. So one of the things we have to do is to try to eliminate the nervousness, the anxiety, and the fear.

Of that, I’m not going to get pregnant. I’m not going to get pregnant. I’m not going to get pregnant because another thing about nature that’s very smart is nature decides that it’s not wise for a mammal that’s under stress to get pregnant because nature thinks that stress means. Famine, predators, forest fire, whatever.

And it doesn’t think that it means that you’ve read, you know, you’re, you’re Googling Dr. Google and you’re getting stressed out. It doesn’t know the difference. It just knows you’re putting out stress hormones, stress hormones will make it less likely that you’ll ovulate regularly or that maybe you’ll.

Prep the lining of your uterus correctly or whatever else. And then we have all the environmental factors as well, not just the vaccine issue that we have now, but, but five G and GMO and, you know, other things that are toxins in the environment that can affect that sort of thing. So, you know, so the best chance you have of getting pregnant is to be in love.

Be happy, not worry, don’t focus on it, don’t, you know, don’t like sit there with your monitors and again, some people are going to be mad at me for saying this because they find security in doing that and I understand that I’m not picking on anyone individually, I’m just telling you what nature has in store for us and so nature by waiting until it’s safe to get pregnant, nature therefore ensures the best chance of survival, that’s what it does.

So that’s fecundity. So now what happens is say you get pregnant, and when you get pregnant, you no longer have a fertility problem. Fertility is about getting pregnant. You now potentially can have, you know, a genetic problem or miscarriage problem or a keeping a pregnancy problem. And so I guess it’s still under the blanket of fertility, but it’s should be categorized differently than somebody who can’t get pregnant.

Somebody who’s had three miscarriages. Needs to be evaluated, but somebody, but the evaluation is completely different than someone who’s had no pregnancies and has been trying for nine months or 10 months or a year or two years or. Five years or whatever it’s been. And so the chance of miscarriage we used to quote when I was training was about 30 percent of all conceptions will miscarry.

But now because of the data that’s coming out about COVID and stuff, I’m hearing more that it used to be 15 or 20 percent of miscarriages because now it’s risen and we’re seeing a higher, a higher miscarriage rate. But miscarriage is actually sometimes, sometimes it’s obviously iatrogenically caused or, or environmentally caused, but many times it’s, it’s, it’s nature’s design to get rid of something that wasn’t correct in the first place.

The leading cause of miscarriage is probably just genetic defect that’s usually not hereditary, but just accidental. And so it’s sad, it’s tragic, it’s a loss, but it’s something that, that when you think about the complexity that makes you and me up, Roseanne, that one sperm with 23 chromosomes in it enters an egg with 23 chromosomes in it.

It makes one cell and from that cell, you then have cells dividing. Some of those cells will become placenta and membranes and other of those cells will become baby. How does it know? I mean, it’s amazing. And then the part that becomes baby, some of those cells will become fingernails. And some of those cells will become pancreas.

And some of those cells will become eyeballs. And what’s amazing is how do they know they all came from one cell? How did they know? And then how did they end up in the right place? How come I don’t have a pancreas coming off my forehead? I know it makes you laugh. But it’s simply amazing, but it’s so complex that to think that something isn’t going to go wrong some of the time, you know, and nature takes care of it most of the time that way.

Sometimes you have things that linger on for a long time and, and they need medical intervention, like a DNC for a blighted ovum or fetal demise. That’s a little bit later on. Most of the time those things will be taken care of and some of them are very early and we don’t even know how early I mean because we because a woman’s like two days late on her period.

It’s a little heavier than usual and they didn’t run any sort of blood pregnancy test. A urine pregnancy test would never be positive anyway at that point. So they don’t even know. So there are probably more miscarriages than we know about. That’s where I think I got the 30 percent number from. But, but whatever number it is, it’s a normal thing that happens as well.

There are now man made issues that are causing more of them. And if you want to go there later in the conversation, we can. What I’m trying to say is it’s complex. It’s not simple. It is a design and Oh, and then getting back to the age. As you get older, a couple of things happen. It’s a little more difficult to conceive because the eggs are a little harder to fertilize and they’re slightly more likely to develop a chromosomal abnormality.

But the idea that because you’re 35 or older, that you’re going to have a baby with that, with that has down syndrome or some other trisomy or some other genetic abnormality is still really small. It’s really small. I mean, well, it depends. See, really small is not a good term that I’m, I’m guilty of doing, saying what I could accuse my doctor friends of.

It’s, there’s a small percentage. It’s age related. There’s scales. You can actually look them up, but the risk of down syndrome, baby, a baby with down syndrome, you have to, I want to use the language correctly. There is about one in 200 at age 35. So it’s a 99. 5 percent chance. It’s not going to happen. And most conceptions with trisomies or miscarry anyway.

So the rarer one that goes to term or that goes to where you have genetic diagnosis and then have to decide, make a decision, a very personal decision for you and your family as to where to go with that. And that’s not a conversation that’s, that I’m an expert at. That’s a conversation that belongs to the woman and her family and her life sit life situation.

So we’ll just leave that at that. Okay. So that’s that. As I was listening, I was like. Man, I wish I was in Southern California at the time I was trying to conceive. I’m like, if only I heard some of what Dr. Fishbein is talking about here, I would have felt completely different because When my husband and I were trying to conceive, but the messaging that we got was, look, you’re, you know, you’re over the hill, it’s time, you know, you need to go straight into IVF, you know, you can try for 15 minutes, but if it’s not working, like straight into IVF, like, and at that point I wasn’t awake, Dr.

Fishbein, I have to admit, I was not awake at that point, I had no license, no agency, I figured the white coats knew better than me, And I had completely abdicated my power and found myself having the first round of IVF literally within weeks. And I was not prepared. Like, I was not at all prepared. Not only was I admittedly and embarrassingly ignorant, I thought that IVF just meant, I’m going to go have this treatment and I’ll be pregnant by May.

You know, like I honestly thought that that’s just what happened and that took me down a road of an awakening that I had like no clue was waiting for me. Yeah, I hear you. The expectations are often not well explained and blown out of proportion. I truly am not an expert in IVF, so I wouldn’t want to sit here and give counseling on that, but what I am is sort of an expert is the fact that you said that the white coats know more than you do.

Well, that’s true. They do know more than you do. The problem is, is that knowledge does not equal wisdom, and it’s really important to know that. That they have a lot of information in their noggin, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to apply that on any individual situation. So, you know, and also, and again, I’m not saying this is true for all of my, my colleagues, all the financial incentives in medicine are to do more and not less.

And so whether it’s when you have a pregnancy and they want to do all these labs and all these tests on you and all these ultrasounds and non stress tests and all these things, you know, a lot of them are not necessary, but they’ll scare you into believing they’re necessary. They’ll implant these fears.

They’ll tell you at your 20 week scan that you have a perfectly normal baby, but there’s this little white echogenic focus in the heart that doesn’t really mean anything as an isolated finding. So I’m not really worried about it, but I want to see you back in six weeks to look at it. So what is the woman thinking about for the next six weeks?

Sick baby. That there’s something wrong with my baby’s heart, even though there’s nothing wrong with your baby’s heart, because the doctors have knowledge, but they don’t know how to express that in a way that is reassuring. Or they purposely express it in a way because that’s how they were taught and that generates more revenue for them or their, their practice.

And what’s really hard about that is you really want to trust your doctor. But they’ve proven over and over again that they’re not trustworthy. And that may mean he may be, or she may be the nicest person in the world. And they may have been doing your pap smear for a decade and you love them. And you talk about.

You know, growing flowers and, and going to concerts and you, you have a really nice relationship with them. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything though, because that often will tell you things that if you’d actually start to look into them, you’ll find out aren’t true. And at what point, when someone starts to tell you things that are questionable or untrue or don’t sit well with your inner sixth sense, God, do you say, well, they keep telling me things that aren’t true.

Why do I keep going back there? Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s, that was kind of the point because you were talking about, you know, nature knows. When you’re stressed, I mean, and this is not a great time to have a baby, but Dr. Fishbein, I was so lacking and I know so many of the women that I work with, so many of the women listening to this, like we’re in such fear that this dream, this desire that we have in our heart to be moms is not going to happen that the minute it’s.

Somebody says, you know, X, Y, Z, we go into freak out. Like if somebody, and I’m a reasonable person, sort of, you know, if somebody had just stopped me, doc, and said, you’re working 90 hours a week, you do sexual assault cases, you might want to reduce your stress. Maybe change your diet, maybe get a little more exercise and, and maybe cut out a little bit of that coffee.

I was only 37 when this started and at a healthy weight, generally speaking, healthy lifestyle. That would have changed my world doc. If somebody just stopped and spoke sense to me rather than immediately showing me this horrific chart that were for a thousand and one reasons why it wouldn’t be possible for me.

They didn’t tell you any of that? Absolutely not. It was, I remember when I went in, it was like. Okay. They, you know, transvaginal ultrasound. Okay. And you’re how old? Ooh. All right. IVF is going to be your best shot and donor eggs, and I remember sitting catatonic in the clinic like this, you know, donor eggs, like I’ve barely even been trying a year.

That’s the sixth sense that you’re talking about. My gut was like, no, this isn’t right. But I didn’t have the languaging and again, I didn’t like, I don’t have the tools to do that. I would just like to your listeners to understand that everything that you said that they, that they should have told you to do, everyone should be doing that anyway.

With your male or female, you know, working 90 hours a week, being stressed out, drinking too much coffee, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, not exercising, not getting sunlight. I mean, do I, do, do doctors really need to tell people this? Well, I mean, I didn’t learn this any, you know, but I’m one of those women that you’re talking about.

I was brainwashed. I thought that career was going to make me happy. I thought I could, I had bigger balls than any man that I was, you know, like I had this whole like alleged feminist nonsense going in my head thinking. That there was going to be no consequence and that I could just outwork anything that came in.

It was a very masculine way of living. I didn’t even have any contact with my feminine. Like I had no clue. And the only reason why I knew anything about, well, and I barely knew much about my own anatomy was because I was a sexual assault prosecutor. I didn’t, like, I knew I had stuff. I didn’t know what it did.

It was mysterious. And I’m like a highly educated adult, and if I don’t know this, I know other women just like me in my audience feel this way too, which is why this conversation with you is so critically important, because I want to help bring women off the edge, because everyone is in a panic and just not critically thinking about what’s being thrown into them, because I went for it doc, I, I, I went in, I went for it.

And did an IVF with not even a blood test prior. It was just aged number of follicles. That was it. And, and do you have a How much did that cost you? Twenty grand. There you go. There’s a difference between nature and human nature. Human nature is to be the seven deadly sins of, you know, those things, uh, and greed is one of them.

But nature is something that we’ve gotten away from so much, so, especially in the big cities and stuff like that, where people are away from the earth and they don’t think about that. But here’s a, here’s a question for you and your listeners. Why does a girl get her period when she’s 12 years old? No clue.

That’s the problem. Yeah. What does the period signify? Hormonal change into adulthood? Yeah, that you’re ovulating. So why would nature want a 12 year old to ovulate? Okay, so, I don’t want to pin you down on this. So, here’s, here’s just a theory. Nature works on, on millennia and eons. Nature doesn’t, you know, 10, 000 years ago the life expectancy was what, 20?

Okay, so you had to reproduce at a young age. Now I’m not suggesting anywhere, and nobody write in and say that I’m suggesting that 12 year olds should be having babies. But nature doesn’t know that. Nature still thinks it’s 10, 000 years ago. We’re changing it faster than we could have ever changed it in the history of mankind with all the epigenetic things that, are affecting us in the microbiome and other things, but it’s still nature’s design that at 12 or 13 years older, whenever you get your first period, that the only reason to do that is because nature wants you to procreate.

Society doesn’t, but nature does. We’re having babies now long after women would have been women and men would have been dead 10, 000 years ago, but nature doesn’t, it doesn’t move that long. So it’s not normal for women to get pregnant in their thirties and forties biologically. Sociologically, it’s, it’s perfectly normal, but you have to expect that with any time you mess with Mother Nature and her design, there are going to be downstream consequences.

And one of those consequences is going to be delayed or altered fertility or delayed or altered genetics or whatever, because nature didn’t design 35, 40, 45 year old women to get pregnant. Culture does. Culture wants it to happen, but nature doesn’t want it to happen. So just keep that in mind when you are raising your daughters, not to go out and not to go to college or not to not to get a job and do that thing, but to keep that in mind that to keep nature in mind, always keep nature in mind.

What does nature want when we lock people down? And took away all the things that make us healthy, social connection, sunlight, vitamin D, exercise. What did we think was going to happen? They don’t think. They don’t think because they’re either idiots. evil or evil idiots, but there’s not much choice in between because they’re corrupt.

I mean, there was so much money to be made in what, in what that happened. And it’s the same thing here. I’m not saying that fertility specialists are the ones causing women to delay getting pregnant, but there’s certainly a market for it. And I don’t blame them charging what they charge. That’s a whole other story, but it gets back to the whole idea of what we’re doing by delaying childbearing for whatever reason, no relationship, job, whatever, stress, famine, war.

We’re defying what nature wants your body to do. And we can see that because when a woman is, has normal periods, say every 30 days, she has a period. And suddenly there’s. 9 11 happens or something, and there’s stress throughout the family, or the family members, whatever, and, and there’s stress. What will happen often is the women will begin to, like, not ovulate, and she’ll skip her periods.

Or she’ll have dysfunctional bleeding. She’ll have abnormal bleeding because the uterus is waiting for signals. The, I liken the uterus to like a platoon out on patrol. And I liken the, the ovaries to being the forward operating base. And I like the pituitary gland and the brain to like be the Pentagon.

So anytime there’s a breakdown in communication between the Pentagon and the forward operating base or between the forward operating base. And the platoon on patrol, the platoon doesn’t know what to do. Do we, do we advance? Do we retreat? Or do we hold our position? So, the same stress that could cause a woman to not ovulate for several months could have a different woman have what’s called dysfunctional uterine bleeding.

And she could be bleeding all the time. Because the uterus is waiting for the ovary to tell it, I mean, yeah, it’s waiting for the ovary to tell it what to do. And the ovary is shut down because the pituitary says, You know, we’re closed for business right now because we have to deal with this thing over here because nature doesn’t want you to get pregnant When circumstances are not optimal for survival and it doesn’t know that we’re 10 000 years in the future So we have to think about that.

So when you’re 40 years old and you’re not getting pregnant, right? That’s actually normal So you have to understand you have to be respectful of the of the biology that goes on and if we could if we teach our young girls in in health class in eighth grade This sort of thing as opposed to the crap that they’re teaching them now about, you have no idea what sex you are until you, what you can and you can change tomorrow and all that stuff.

And again, I’ll probably get mail for that too, but I don’t care. Um, that’s okay. We can take it, right? No, I, I, I get it. But you know, I mean, you could teach both actually, but I, I’m not for the second one, but I, but it should certainly be teaching. Eighth grade girls about this sort of biology that I talked about so that then they can make, they can make an informed decision, Roseanne, about whether or not they wanna look for a, a partner or not have a partner and maybe just have, be a single month or, or freeze their eggs, which I’m not a big fan of because it’s just sort of propagating the whole problem.

I understand where they’re coming from or whether they want to go get a career and do all that stuff. And under, at least they understood that the choice they made might lead to the problem that you might have had. In the future. Well, I think you’re hitting on a really important topic that doesn’t get a lot of airplay because it’s counter to the narrative is, you know, like we’re, we’re conditioned as women to think that the strong thing, the empowered thing is to go out and get 15 degrees slay during the day, come home, you know, and, and do it all over again.

And that that’s natural and that this desire to have love and a family and all that is weak. And I remember, I remember thinking to myself, I’m like, well, you know, I’m supposed to go out and get a degree so that I don’t have to depend on a man and all this other stuff. And, and it’s not about dependence is about a complete and full happy life.

And that’s what I see in my practice all the time. You know, women with letters. Coming after their names, we, you know, it’s great and we’re empowered and we have, you know, incredible earning potential and we’re making a difference in the world, but we have completely forgotten that we’re women. And, and that we have this longing because like, you know, I could be working with, you know, clients that are physicians, lawyers, teachers, nurses, we all end up in the same place saying, is this all there is and here I, here I’ve been suppressing this desire to have a baby for so long to get to some place that here I am in my mid forties.

And, and here, and it, you know, without the baby that I want and the life that I want. So it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s, it’s, it’s, well, it’s a minimal part of it is your fault because you’re listening to, you’re listening to the propaganda and, and look at the culture from the time when I, when I was a younger kid.

And the Virginia Slims commercials came out, they were cigarettes, and they said, you know, the theme was, you can have it all, baby. And that, that being a homemaker and a mother was something to be frowned upon because she didn’t have a career. And even to this day, pop culture looks at women who get married young, have seven kids, that there’s something wrong with them and they’re mocked.

You know, um, I love the South Park guys, but, but when they wrote the Book of Mormon, which is a very funny play if you’ve ever seen it, but you can only write a play like that about Mormons because Mormons have a good sense of humor when it regards them. But you, you know, you, you couldn’t really write a play like that about Muslims or Orthodox Jews or, or even the Amish who have lots and lots of children.

And that’s what their life focus is. Because they’re not focused on Beyonce or, you know, whatever, or Kim Kardashian or drinking and partying and going to raves and these sorts of things. They have a different priority because that’s what the pop culture is. pushing because ultimately if you put it all together with everything that’s been going on in the last years, you start to see more clearly that this is ultimately an agenda from some larger world order thing, whether it’s agenda 2030 or the world economic forum or whatever else it’s really to sort of depopulate the planet and it’s transhumanism.

It’s, it’s like, we’re going to be growing babies in a, in a test tube pretty soon anyway. So you know, why should you give up your life and have your body change and have your, you know, I won’t even get into the parts that women complain about after they’ve given childbirth. But, but, um, yeah, I, why would you do that?

Uh, because the culture doesn’t want you to do that because it’s, it’s not commercial enough that they, they, they don’t want you to homeschool. They don’t want you, they want to have your families, your kids, your reproductive systems. They want it all to be controlled centrally. And one of the ways to prevent people from having Children is to convince them that.

You shouldn’t have children in your 20s or 30s because you don’t even know what you’re doing yet. And, uh, I would tell you that that’s all backwards. And again, that’s because they’re, they’re, they’re anti nature. Um, you know, their whole, their whole idea of saving the planet is actually to destroy, is to destroy the planet.

But then, if you watch public policy on just about anything, including medicine, Right now pretty much everything they tell you is the opposite of what a sane person would do and that’s coming out More and more, you know, there was a study. Dr. Fishbein that came out in 2009 From the wharton school of business that showed that women Between 1972 and 2006, actually, you know, with all of, you know, the, the women’s movement and all of these things.

Today, we’re actually dramatically less happy with all the education, all of the, the freedoms that we have, like women are paying the price like. Women in their 50s and 60s are on antidepressants at record levels. Like it’s insane. So all of these measures that we were promised would make us happy, the money, the career, all these other things.

It’s like the data is showing. Like, these women are rushing to have babies because they know there has to be more. They can’t outrun their biology, you know, they want to have this family that they were told was wrong. Yeah, and again, it gets back to the idea that everything they were told was anti nature.

Yeah, you know, you, you, what you just said, if you just people just rewind it 30 seconds and listen to what you just said, all these things they told these women was, was anti nature. And you know, when you do that sort of thing, you end up with unhappiness. and with problems. And then of course, what’s their solution to the problem of causing more women to have depression?

It’s Big Pharma. It’s to give them SSRIs, which recently we found out, and they knew a long time ago, don’t work. It’s a billion dollar scam to give you a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Prozac or whatever the other ones are. And they found that that doesn’t work, just like they’ve, there’s data coming out on, on statins.

My internist wanted to put everybody who had a cholesterol over 200 on a statin, thinking it’s going to make them live longer, not realizing, well, wait a minute, why does nature have us have cholesterol in the first place? Maybe it’s not the cholesterol that’s the problem. Maybe it’s the food I’m eating that’s the problem.

But no, we’re going to treat, because the pharmacy can’t make, any money on doing nothing. So if you’re healthy, they don’t need you. But if we can make you chronically ill by vaccinating the shit out of you and by, you know, making you do all these, and then we have a, we have a patient for life and they’ve got people on SSRIs, a large percent of the population, people on statins.

You know, it’s kind of like, don’t people watch the movies? Don’t you read the novels? This stuff doesn’t end well. It always ends poorly. I mean, you’ve got stories of thalidomide, and you’ve got stories of diethylstilbestrol, and you’ve got stories of Vioxx, and, you know, the COVID 19 vaccine is going to outweigh all of those.

In the damage that it’s going to have caused yeah, and they knew it But the problem is they knew it ahead of time and they did it anyway Yeah, and and it’s exciting that there are more and more people waking up But I think the hard part is being willing to wrap our heads around the fact that we got scammed I think that is That’s the cognitive dissonance I think that you were talking about before that.

And when I think back, even when we think about fertility, we tell ourselves, oh, well this person’s trying to help me. Like, you know, and then it’s like, well, they don’t exactly have a great track record. Big pharma, big pharma’s been, you know, sued to like, to high heaven and they still keep going and nobody’s stopping them.

And, and women are being denied basic information about how to be more empowered. In in taking control of their own health care and taking control over, you know, their their own health destiny and ultimately fertility destiny because it gets scared out of their wits, right? Yeah, I mean, we we’ve sort of taking this to its logical end is that they don’t have your best interest at heart.

They often never did. Now that’s not to say, of course, that they don’t have miracle medical cures and miracle surgeries and miracle things. And this gets, every time I do a podcast, and pretty much when I listen to other people’s podcasts, they always throw out the disclaimer. That we’re not throwing the entire baby out with the bathwater.

There are some good things that the medical system does. There are miraculous things that, that infertility specialists do. It’s not their fault that women are waiting until they’re having fertility problems to go see. So they’re just meeting a market need and they could do amazing things. The idea that you can create a fetus in a, in a laboratory and that you can re implant it and it grows and becomes a beautiful baby.

Ever since Louise Brown was the very first IVF baby from what I understand, and uh, that’s amazing, but we have to understand that the majority of things that are going on with them are not okay, and the cognitive dissonance you mentioned is very strong, and one of the coping mechanisms for cognitive dissonance is to ignore or belittle any evidence that doesn’t support your position, and so when somebody has chosen to believe this stuff over and over again, And then someone comes along and points it out.

It’s uncomfortable. And so you often will attack the messenger. I give you a everyday example. Say one of your listeners goes out to Costco and buys a, you know, a 50 inch flat screen smart TV. And then somebody comes over who says, Oh, that’s a nice new TV. Where’d you get it? I got it at Costco. You should have got it here because you could have got it for this much less.

How do you feel when somebody says that you unsolicited? You’re a little aggravated with them. Yeah. Yeah. Why are you telling me that? Why do I need to know? I, I happy with my TV. You just made me unhappy with my TV. Cause I could have saved 40 by getting it over at Walmart or something, whatever, but people do that.

And they sometimes, they often do it without thinking, but it gets you riled up a little bit and some people get so riled up that they attack. Yeah, and we’ve lost the ability to have a subtle conversation where two things can be true at the same time. Yes. Where we can be like, okay, well, we, we received this social conditioning that we’re supposed to do X, Y, Z as women.

But, you know, you can also do other things and, and that’d be okay. Like, I mean, I have to admit, like, when I was going through law school, I would look at women who were having babies and think, poor thing, right? The idea of doing that, like it was, it’s, it’s horrific, but that’s not because I’m an evil person.

It’s because Having a baby was horrific to you, to your mind in law school? Wow. Well, yeah, because I was like, why would you throw away your freedom? Right. And, and it’s, it’s baffling to me today, right? It’s that hubris and that, that ignorance that, hey, two choices can be wonderful. They’re just a reflection of what that person values.

One’s not better than the other. But what’s interesting is that. You know, I, I agree with you, you know, fertility specialists are, are in some ways very heroic and helping us undo the damage from decades of this programming that women, like, because what are we going to do? Leave women in their forties out to dry?

No, like that seems crazy too, right? So that we’re, well, think about it though. I agree with you. You shouldn’t. And our culture is able to do that. But nature would say, yeah. Yeah. Nature is ruthless in that way. Like she is exacting in her justice. And so it’s, it’s fascinating. So let’s talk about, okay, you know, we’re, we’re in this place where women are starting to wake up.

What would you encourage women to do? Okay. Once they find out that they’re pregnant, whether it’s naturally IVF, whatever. Like, what are some common sense things that women who are thinking can do to take back their license and agency and make sure that they get the care that they deserve? One of the things they should really do is they should be trusting in that.

Nature’s design works really well most of the time and they should seek out care not based on where their insurance card tells them to go or because they’ve been going to some place for a long time. This is a life event. You’ve heard Bliss and me talk about the fact on the podcast that that when you have a wedding, you plan everything.

You plan the color of the napkins, you plan the dresses, you plan the venue, you plan the food, you plan the invitations, you plan all that stuff. You wouldn’t let a third party come in and tell you, you know, where you can, you know, have your event and who you can invite and invite people you don’t like.

And, and, you know, you can have the fish, but not the chicken. And you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t do that. But yet, when it comes to birth, which is the, probably the most sentinel event in a woman’s life. You know, her marriage is something that is obviously extremely important, but half of them end in divorce anyway, but, uh, it is an extremely important day, but there’s nothing like the day that you give birth to your child, no matter how that baby comes forth.

And so you should treat it like that and you should not treat it like a medical problem like you would if you had an appendicitis and you’d use your insurance card. You need to think differently about pregnancy. And so you need, you know, I would tell young women to start saving. If your state has a health savings account, you should put money away in there.

It’s tax deductible or tax free afterwards, or I don’t know exactly how it works, but you can do that. You know, we put 20, 30 a month away into an account by the way, you know, when you’re 18, when you’re 28 years old, you have several thousands of dollars in there. And if you want to hire, go outside of your network or hire a doctor at a hospital that has a better reputation or, or, you know, don’t be hesitant to drive 50 miles or 100 miles across state lines.

And I would always tell people that even if you plan to deliver in the hospital with a doctor, seek some prenatal care with a midwife because you’re going to get much better attention to the things that are going to keep you healthy from her. You’re going to talk about your diet. You’re going to talk about stress reduction.

You’re going to talk about your relationship. You’re going to talk about exercise. You’re going to talk about it because you can do in 60 minutes a lot more than you can do in 10, 6 to 10 minutes. This is what you get with your OB in general because they’re doing volume and your midwife is not. So pay out of pocket.

Make it, make it have value if it has value. And understand that there’s very little that you do that’s going to cause a normal pregnancy to miscarry. Short of really falling out of a third story window. or doing a cocaine binge for three straight days or something like that, you’re not going to cause a miscarriage by bumping your abdomen with a, with a grocery cart or by, by accidentally, or before you know you’re pregnant, having a couple glasses of wine or being next to somebody who’s got a, uh, a cold or a flu.

That doesn’t cause a, nature is stronger than that. And if you have a normal developing fetus inside of you, it’s not going to fall out because of any of those things. So you don’t have to really worry about that stuff. This. Nature is beautiful. It’s kind of like breathing or digestion for your listeners.

Fortunately, we don’t have to think about it. Can you imagine what it’d be like every day to have to think about 40 times a minute or 20 times a minute thinking about breathing in and breathing out? I mean, that would, you’d go nuts. It happens whether you think about it or not because it’s a primitive brain function.

Same thing is with conceiving, growing, and going into labor with a baby. It’s all primitive brain function. And when you start to think about things or use your cognitive brain, you actually interfere with that. So breathing can be altered not by normal breathing, primitive brain, but by cognitive