Victoria Clayton is a Coward

As you may recall, Victoria Clayton wrote a book, Fearless Pregnancy, and an article on MSNBC which was filled with errors. A couple of examples:

The odds were overwhelmingly in a pregnant woman’s favor that around 40
weeks or so from conception, one way or another and mostly regardless
of what she had or hadn’t done, the average pregnant woman would
deliver a baby and that baby would be just swell.

I also discovered that once you saw the fetal heartbeat via an early
ultrasound when you were around six weeks pregnant, your chances of
miscarrying drop to just 2 percent.

I know that most of the readers of this blog are aware that the chance of miscarriage ranges from 25% to as much as 40%, if you include very early miscarriages that typically happen in the first couple of weeks, before most women even know they’re pregnant. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t exactly call those "overwhelming" odds. It’s also a total lie that if you hear a heartbeat at 6 weeks your miscarriage risk drops to 2%. There are lots of different reports on this, but generally I have found that, while the risk drops gradually week by week, the significant drop is at 12 weeks– the point at which all of the major organs and parts are formed. I know I had a miscarriage after hearing a heartbeat at 7 weeks and none of the doctors I spoke with felt that the fact that it happened at this stage was particularly noteworthy.

After the publication of her article on MSNBC, Victoria Clayton got a few emails, and she responded to them in an embarassingly inept way on her Fearless Pregnancy blog. After never having received any comments before on her blog, she received, last I checked, 30 or 40 comments on this post, most of them pointing out her inaccuracies.

Are you curious to know how she responded? Are you? Because Akeeyu alerted me to the fact that Victoria Clayton has deleted all of our comments (and removed the commenting option) from her Fearless Pregnancy blog!! What a fucking coward. (Which, if you think about it, is funny for someone who has written a whole book about being fearless…) The whole purpose of a blog is to create a two-way discourse. If you want a PR site, then make a PR site, not a blog! And if you’re so sure that you’re right about everything you wrote, why not refute the points of the commenters? And if they’ve made you aware of things you hadn’t known or thought about, say so and apologize. Simply deleting the discourse is cowardly and sinister, and it makes me mad.

My original comments are posted here, for posterity. If you have a blog, I encourage you to re-create and re-post your comments there as well, or here in my comments section. At the moment I’m on the first page of a Google search for "fearless pregancy blog" and second for a search for "fearless pregnancy." The more you link to one of these two entries, the higher up I’ll go, so go to it!