Dr. Stuart Fischbein trained as an OB-GYN at Cedars-Sinai and spent the first part of his career doing exactly what the system taught him to do. Then midwives started bringing him their home birth transfers — and everything began to shift. After 24 years of backing midwives from within the hospital, he left entirely. Today he teaches breech and twin delivery skills to practitioners around the world, and has delivered babies at home that the system had long since written off as impossible or dangerous.
In this conversation, Remnant and Dr. Stu trace the full anatomy of a system that has turned a normal biological function into a medical event - and in doing so, has made outcomes worse, not better. They cover the cowardice and economic incentives that drive obstetric decision-making, the use of fear as a management tool, the difference between relative risk and actual risk, and the specific claims made about breech delivery, twin birth, VBAC, and routine hospital interventions that do not survive scrutiny.
RemnantMD also shares his own experience: his first child born in a hospital, his wife depleted and hollowed out after; his next two born at home, the midwife arriving too late, his wife radiant immediately after. And what that contrast taught him about what birth is supposed to be — and what medicine has taken from it.
Topics Covered
First do no harm — and the paradox that the medical license exists to cover harm, not prevent it
How cowardice is manufactured in medicine: managed care, hospital employment, and the removal of physician leverage
Medical schools recruiting sheep, not shepherds
The Essure device, intrauterine metal coils, and the absence of basic precautionary thinking
Birth control pills, statins, and SSRIs as lifetime patient creation
The C-section rate: from 5% in 1970 to 35% today
Why hospitals cannot afford to let normal births be normal
How fear is weaponized against pregnant women
Fetal growth restriction: the definition changed and generated more business
Twin growth charts vs. singleton growth charts
Breech delivery: the actual risk numbers
The Term Breech Trial: no quality control on practitioner skill
How to correctly perform a breech birth
Twin birth: actual stillbirth statistics by week
Pregnancy as preparatory medicine: the system programs fear before conception and monetizes it through delivery
Midwives as the torchbearers of breech and twin skills
Stillbirth and the limits of surveillance
Dr. Stu can be found at Birthing Instincts: the website, the podcast, the instagram account.
