Ahh, I see you have run across Amy Tuteur, our very own Bill O’Reilley of the birth world. Like him, her intent is to steamroller you; any overlap with the facts in her rants is strictly coincidental.

Some weeks ago, someone e-mailed me asking who she was. I said that I didn’t know, but it might be interesting to poke around on the internet and find out. A week or so later, my correspondent got back to me. She wrote that she could verify that Amy is a real person, but not that Amy is an M.D., much less an obstetrician. At least, she could find no license to practice medicine for Amy. My correspondent also found that some of Amy’s domain names are held publicly, but who holds the registration on homebirthdebate.com is not, which is something that can be done at an additional fee. This raises the question of why she would conceal the domain backer, especially since she has not done this with the others. She has also gone to the trouble and expense of copyrighting homebirth debate, which denies others access to the term. My correspondent speculates that Amy may be fronting a disinformation campaign. Blogs have become a common tool for this sort of thing. It’s an interesting, if somewhat paranoid, thought. If she is, an obvious suspect comes to mind for which entity might be backing her. It is certainly one that has deliberately spread disinformation in the past.

My advice to you is the same as was given to me when she started posting on my Forum: Don’t feed the dragon. I had no idea who she was at first so I refuted her objections to a study showing that elective cesarean surgery increased the neonatal death rate. That segued into her criticisms of the MANA 2000 study, which I rebutted as well. If you look at the top of the topic list, you will see a link marked “search.” If you search this Forum’s posts on “Tuteur,” you should turn up our exchange and see my defense of these studies, and how I handled her. My strategy worked well. She hasn’t been back.

-- Henci