Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD, Techno Obstetricians and Cyborg Babies

Pushing Boundaries with Dr. Thomas R Verny

My guest today is Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD, Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, Rice University, Houston and Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Dr. Davis-Floyd is a medical/reproductive anthropologist, international speaker (over 1000 presentations) and researcher in transformational models in childbirth, midwifery and obstetrics. She is author of over 80 articles, 23 encyclopedia entries, and of Birth as an American Rite of Passage (1992, 2003) and Ways of Knowing about Birth: Mothers, Midwives, Medicine, and Birth Activism (2018); coauthor of From Doctor to Healer: The Transformative Journey (1998) and The Power of Ritual (2016); and co-editor of 12 collections. Robbie serves as Editor for the International Childbirth Initiative and Lead Editor for the Routledge series “Social Science Perspectives on Childbirth and Reproduction.”
I asked her about her most recent book, BIRTHING TECHNO-SAPIENS:
HUMAN-TECHNOLOGY CO-EVOLUTION AND THE FUTURE OF REPRODUCTION. What is a techno-sapiens? After offering an explanation, I wanted to know the meaning of cyborg.
I read that once Robbie was asked by a frustrated Latin American epidemiologist,
"Why don’t obstetricians get it? We epidemiologists understand that the vast majority of what they do during labor and birth is just plain wrong. Lots of pediatricians do too. Like—cutting the umbilical cord immediately is just plain stupid! So why don’t OBs act according to the evidence, as we have long been insisting that they do? Instead they just blindly follow obstetric traditions—why can’t they learn to think for themselves? “ She answered that the majority of obstetricians are fear driven; fear of anything going wrong, fear of being sued, fear of criticism by colleagues if they dare not to follow the status quo. She said none of the obstetricians practicing in the US have ever seen a normal unassisted vaginal birth. Robbie would dearly like to see present day obstetrics humanized.
Robbie is, amongst her many other projects, working on a personal memoir.
My guest next week will be Susan Highsmith Phd, Counselor, Author of "The First Fairy Tales I - IV" a series of fairy tales for unborn, newborn and very young children designed to help parents bond with their children and children attach to their parents.
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