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The only city in America. It's the show that you said your news. It's The Daily Show with your home Michelle.
Welcome to The Daily Show. I'm Michelle Wolf. It's my final night of the show. Yeah, no more show for me, and I just want to say you were a worthy adversary, Linda from HR Duchy Touchy.
We've got a great show for you tonight.
So let's get into the headline.
Let's kick things.
Off with Elon Musk, the guy who's having an apartheid with his own face. He's been on a non apology apology tour following the fallout from his antisemitic.
Tweets, and like a tesla, it's been blowing up in his face.
Blaw Musk, the world's wealthiest man, has a message for companies who don't want to advertise on X and I can't repeat it on morning television or else.
This will be my last day.
What this advertising boycott is going to do, It's going to kill a company.
And you think that and the whole world.
Will know that those advertisers killed the company. If somebodys going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmailing with money, go fick yourself, but go yourself? Is that clear?
I hope it is. Oh, it's clear.
It's clear that Elon has accomplished something in He's made able root for advertisers.
That's crazy.
Anyone could build an electric car, but you're the only true genius who could lose coolness battle to mucinext.
You're not a victim here, Elon.
It's not blackmail to not advertise on Twitter. They don't want anything from you. They just don't like you. And you should be used to this by now. If you don't, if you don't donate money to the KKK, the KKK isn't like Ah, So it's blackmail, is it?
No, it's not. You suck. Also, blackmail is.
The kk's least favorite type of myth.
You know, i'd feel so bad for Elon if either of us could feel.
This.
Guy swears so badly he doesn't want to be liked, but it's so obvious to everyone that he really wants to be liked. He wants to be like so badly. He bought a company that's all about likes. He's the poster child for money doesn't buy happiness. You can see it in his recently purchased face and his jacket from Burlington Divorce Factory. Let's move on to some major international news. France has just decided to ban smoking on beaches, in
forests and near schools. Seriously, France, what are you doing to your people here? They're having a tough year as it is. First they raised their retirement age all the way to thirty two. Now they're not allowed to light up a firestick in a forest.
Come on, what's next? No more mimes in boxes, no more being racist to Muslims, No more bringing up a get home to your son.
And him going jule pabol Will it even be France anymore? Shout out to Jennandlerbong these are you can't get sad about that.
Come on, guys, we're having a celebration here.
These French jokes were brought to you by stereotypes.
Stereotypes, they're usually true. All right, let's move on to some Satin news. You know, it's never easy when someone dies, although when that person has made so many other people die, it kind of takes.
This thing out of it.
Breaking over, Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger passes away his influence profound yet controversial, guiding presidents through Vietnam, the Cold War, and nine to eleven.
Some called him a war criminal for his role in bombing Cambodia and widening the war in Vietnam.
Cambodia forty thousand people by that was car bombing.
Kissinger encouraged the Argentina Dirty War in nineteen seventy six, was the architect behind the illegal and murderous bombings of Cambodia and Laos, supported Augusto Pinochet's brutal military coup in Chile, and turned the blind eye to alleged genocide in Bangladesh.
And ladies, please remember all those things are red flags. But yes, Henry Kissinger is dead, which just goes to show you that if you have zero morals, you'll lead a long, stress free life. He committed massacres and lived to be one hundred, while the rest of us over here are dying at forty seven because we can't stop stressing over the time we waved to a person who was actually waving to someone behind us. But look, no matter how you feel about Henry Kissinger, you got to
agree that he's one of America's greatest war criminals. The question is is he America's greatest war criminal? So to have that debate, let's turn to Ronnie Chang and Michael Costa.
Thank you guys, what do you think?
Well, thing is, there's no question Michelle, Henry Kissinga is the goat of war criminals. You know the last few weeks in high school where you skim through like forty years of terrible American history in like two days.
That's all him, baby being.
Nam, Kembodia, Chile, shaw I'll continue Pakistan and East Timol. This dude was doing massacres in countries that Americans don't even know what countries. He was putting him on the map and then coppet bombing them off the map. He's like a genocidal common San Diego.
Can I get a chance to talk over here, Ronnie, you're clowning yourself. Sure, Kissinger's in the conversation. But this debate starts and ends with Dick Cheney. His his prime years were fire, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo. The man shot his friend in the face. It was one of the nicest things he's ever done.
That's a good points. That's a good point. Ryny. Maybe this is a tie.
To quote the great man himself, go for yourself, Michael, Yeah, should Dick Cheney lied about WMDs, But my boy Kissinger was using WMDs. Plus he was in the game fover sixty years. Dick Cheney had won like five good seasons maybe exactly.
Kissinger stayed in the game just to juice his stats. Okay, when you look at the season splits, Shaney's numbers were better. Not to mention, Kissinger came in after Vietnam started, I mean he was chasing wars the way Durant chases rings. You know, anyone can join a super team.
But Chaney built.
His wars from the ground up.
I mean he carried George W. Bush on his back.
Also, how can Kissinger be the war crimes go when he won the Nobel Peace Prize?
You an idiot?
That's what makes him the got you more on? Do you know how good a war criminal you have to be to win a peace prize? For Wards, you escalated the dude's got the numbers and the hardware, count the rings, bitch.
Okay, guys, let me throw this out to you.
Guys. Okay, Andrew Jackson.
That's a good point. Oh good point.
Yeah, I mean you know he did the numbers.
Look look, look, look.
Michelle, you do have to adjust for that era. Okay, but credit where credit is due. I mean, Jackson was massacring people back when you had to do it with muskets and carrier pigeons. We'll never know what kind of records he could have said if he had had drones and Google maps.
Okay, look, we can't throw a wrong hypotheticals all day, but the bottom line is Andrew Jackson wasn't an international player the way Kissinger was. Okay, Jackson only put up decent numbers at home. He wasn't strong on the road.
Look, Ronnie, just because you speak loudly doesn't make it more true. All right, Look, look, look, look, I think we can all agree no matter who the goat is. What's important to remember is Kissinger's passing really puts things into perspective. So listen, everyone, if there's a war criminal in your life, tell them how you feel about them now, because you never know when they're gonna unexpectedly die of being one hundred years old.
I couldn't agree more. Michael Cassan and Ronnie Changing.
Everybody, let me come back we'll talk about things that have been falling out of my vagina.
So don't go away.
Welcome back to the Daily Show. Let's talk about childbirth. It's hopefully the last time you touch your mom's vagina. And I learned about child birth firsthand because I recently had a baby.
I don't know, she was right here, I don't know. You can't have it all, can't you.
Now.
I chose to have a home birth because I wanted to ruin my couch, and it turns out I was pretty lucky because whenever I talked to a woman who has given birth in a hospital, it's almost always a horror story. The labor was painful, the doctors were rude, the nurse pooped on the table and blamed it on me. But there's a reason why hospital childbirth leads to all these horror stories, and it's something I want to talk about. So lay back and put your feet in the stirrups
for tonight's long story shirt. Childbirth is the number one reason why people go to the hospital in the US. It sends more Americans to the hospital than the allergic reactions.
And oh this got stuck in my butt. That's a light bulb, just so you know.
And every year the healthcare system makes fifty billion dollars from childbirth, and yeah, half of that is just from Nick Cannon.
But it's still a booming industry.
And why is childbirth so expensive?
Because, like everything in America, healthcare is a business, and hospitals look at our uterus like it's an atm.
Delivering Moms are increasingly being charged sky high prices for absolutely every service or supply provided to them and the baby. And those bills aren't just high in many cases, they're bloated.
Every time you walk into the hospital, they look at everything that happens to you and say, can I build for that? It's because they can, they can charge more. Nobody's asking questions, and so they do and they get away with it.
Doctor Marguerite Dwayne delivered naturally just twelve minutes after arriving at the hospital and only stayed one night.
I noticed that I've been charged for two hospital nights. I was charged for medications I didn't receive, such as oxytocin nine hundred and fifty eight dollars for his nursery stay. And he didn't spend one minute nurse and he didn't spend one minute in the nursery.
One woman says she was charged four hundred dollars for motrand and a stool softener.
Four hundred dollars for a stool softener? What is this a hotel mini bar? If you don't have stool softener in your hotel mini bar, you gotta go to a better hotel. And all that money doesn't even equal better care, because, like I said, healthcare is a business, and a business wants to be efficient, but childbirth isn't efficient. Labor could happen at any moment, or it could take over eighteen hours.
It's kind of like orgasms.
Is this gonna be a quickie or is someone leaving here with carpal tunnel?
Nobody knows.
Childbirth is messy and unique and complicated, and it needs the mother to walk around and stretch and bounce on a yoga ball and go to the bathroom because maybe you're gonna take a dump or maybe that that's where you're gonna have the baby.
I'm serious. That happens a lot, and it's beautiful.
But the hospital would rather have us laying down with sensors attached to our bodies because it's more efficient. To monitor all of it at once from a computer screen. Even those screens should be for raising our children, not birthing them.
So here's what happens.
Now you're lying in a bed and your labor slows down, so the hospital speeds up the process by pressuring you to take the drugs that induce labor, even though those drugs affect the heart rate of your baby and increase your pain. So then they suggest an epidural where they jam a needle a fentanyl to your spine to numb your lower body. But now you can't feel your lower body, which means you can't help push through your contractions. And
now you're slowing down your labor again. Your baby's heartbeat is going up and down. It's like a little ravenside your uterus. And the doctor comes and say you're not progressing enough. The baby's heartbeat is erratic. All the shit we made you do is made everything worse. Why would you make us do all that shit to you? And that brings us to the biggest medical intervention of all see sections. Americans have them at an alarmingly high rate.
And it doesn't even and it doesn't always have to do with the health of the mother or the baby.
An alarming number, one in three women giving birth in America today having a sea section, But too often sea sections are not needed.
Sometimes doctors or hospitals may rush a sea section simply because they think labor has gone on long enough. For because the maternity ward is especially busy.
Another reason for the major increase, just for the sake of convenience.
Softer's are rushed.
I mean, when someone's giving birth badually, it can take a long time there in labor, it can take days.
Sea section very quick. You're in and you're out.
Sea sections are major surgery, and they carry all the risks of surgeries.
You give a sea section in twenty eighteen, you have a ninety percent chance of having a sea section second time. But the second time it's a more complicated surgery, And the third time it can be like operating on a melted box of crayons.
Melted box of crayons, Jesus, what happens the fourth time?
We don't even need to do surgery. It just pops out.
Alien and sections aren't just risky for the mother, they're also risky for the baby. Children born via sea sections are four times more likely to develop breathing problems, and if my kid is gonna have trouble breathing, I want it to be because I raised a douchebag who vapes.
Is that cotton candy?
There's got to be a better way to do this, and thankfully there is, and it's.
Not some new fangled silicon valley birthing pod.
It's one of the oldest childbirth technologies there is midwives. Midwife is a clinician who helps you either birth inside of a hospital or outside of a hospital, and for women with uncomplicated pregnancies, midwives are a great idea, mostly because they don't do unnecessary interventions and they're all about patient autonomy. Can you imagine that woman having autonomy? Not
in my America, let's go Brandon. In fact, midwives used to be the Norman delivery until they got pushed out in favor of male doctors.
In the early nineteen hundreds.
Physicians someone on a very effective smear campaign against midwives. They would make posters showing a black branding midwife and a very poor home delivering a baby and saying, would you want this kind of person to deliver your baby?
Joseph de Lee of Chicago called midwives, relics and barbarism.
For me, it.
Appears brutal midwifery, not usin.
It is not sport.
But it is the man behind the that's color.
The man behind the forceips is what counts.
No, you idiot, we don't need you.
Your forceips, your racism, or that weird landing strip go to you got going on, But that's.
Really the point I want to make here.
The hospital doesn't just emphasize efficiency and speed over the mother's health and comfort. It emphasizes the doctor's role over the mothers, particularly when obstructrics was being created by men. And it's such a male thing to think that pulling the babybe out is the entirety of labor when all mothers know that's the easiest part of the whole thing. It's like pulling a piece of toast out of the toaster and saying.
I'm the toaster. So long story short.
For women thinking about having a child, no, ande understand what your options are and that this is your birth, not the hospitals, not the doctors. And look, don't get me wrong, there are pregnancies that need medical interventions. But when the hospital needs don't align with yours. Remember you have choices. Just because you're in a hospital doesn't mean you're sick. Childbirth isn't a disease. It's powerful and natural, and we should give women the chance to experience that.
And as a side benefit, it'll free up all the hospital to figure out how this got up my book.
When we come back, I'll talk to an expert on child's bright doctor Stuart Fishbine, So don't go away.
Welcome back to the Daily Show.
My guest tonight is a community based practicing obstetrician and advocate for the Midwiffery model of care and human rights and childbirth. He also co hosts the Birthing Instincts podcast and teaches seminars on breach and twin vaginal birth around the globe. Please welcome, doctor Stewart Fishbeink. It's so great to have you here.
It's an honor to be here. And I just have to say the last segment was you covered so much. That's so true. And I, as a male physician, little embarrassed walk in the footsteps of all the midwives that came before me and taught me what I didn't necessarily learn in residency.
I see, look, men can give credit to women. It's great. Thank you, Thank you, Elan.
You know you've been you've been in this field for so long. Why do you think there's so much fear around childbirth?
Because fear is the strongest emotion that you can control people with. And I think the reason that we have so much fear in the Western medical world is because the people that are practicing, the doctors are taught to fear birth. They're taught birth is a medical condition, that it needs treatment, that it's chaotic, and that we have
to control that chaos. And so they're fearful. And if you talk to most birth workers, they have that sense of fear, and then they projected onward to the women who of America in other countries and so and it's all you see. I mean, not that the meatia is always bad, but sometimes there's a lot, you know, when you see birth and it's very dramatic and it's you know, it's very and there's a lot of fear, and so it's propagated that way, and then you can control people when you have fear.
Yeah, right, Yeah, it's a very good tool. And you know, and child bird can be such like a lovely thing and it should be a lovely thing, because you know, we are all you know, we're all born at some point, and it's just your entrance into the world is I think significant.
And if I can say, if we just take a step back for a second and we look at how other mammals do it, this can give us a vision into why what we're doing is not working so well. Because when a mammal goes into labor, where does she go? She goes off by herself, who does she go with nobody? And when she's hungry, she does this amazing thing. She eats, and she's thirsty, she drinks. And if she's uncomfortable, she moves.
And when she if she's interrupted in labor through the predator approaches or the little kids run into the bedroom, the mammal will put out hormones like adrenaline which will stop their contractions and they'll get up and they'll run away, and only when it's safe will nature will labor return. And this way nature ensures that the best chance of success. So what we do in the medical model is essentially
antithetical to nature's design. From the moment a woman gets in her car to drive to the hospital, and actually I would say, all through the prenatal care period two to the moment she puts her baby in the car seat to drive home. Pretty Much everything that's done to the woman is opposite of what nature has designed. And it not surprising that labor then doesn't go as well as it should. That we have such high intervention rates thirty forty percent c section rates some countries it's seventy
to eighty percent. We have we're inducing women set thirty fifty eighty percent of women, and hospitals are being induced. I mean, how many cows get induced? You know that sort of It's just the medical model sees birth as a problem. The Midwiffrey model sees birth as a normal function of a woman's body that they trust that nature has a design, and every time you intervene in that design, you will cause some ripple effect downstream, whether immediate or later.
Yeah.
And it's interesting because I think we forget that we are animals because and particularly in birth in my case, it's like.
It was the most animal you feel.
You know, you end up you're in these positions where you're like, I don't I never pictured. I didn't know how my birth would go, and I never pictured what actually happened, But it was like, you do you get in these whatever positions most comfort, you're making these guttural sounds you've never made before, and all of it's just.
Happening to you.
And I was lucky enough to experience it in a way that you know where I was at home and it was it was comfortable, and I was allowed to do all those things.
Yeah, if you let a man will do or a woman do what she wants to do, it's amazing to watch how they will. They will move, they'll do something. The baby's not sitting right in the pelvis instead of laying on their back with an epidural numb and they can't help their baby. They can move. You'll watch them. They'll put a leg up on the side of the bed, they'll squat, they'll get on all fours, they'll do certain things.
The medical model has taken all that away, and now we're stuck with you know, eighty percent of women getting induced and in some hospitals ninety percent of women getting epidurals, and that breaks that connection that women and their babies have. It's a beautiful symphony of hormones that's been going on from the moment of conception, and once that gets interrupted, the baby's sort of left on its own defend. When a woman gets an epidural, its mom is no longer
being able to help it. And so you see that, like you described in your last segment, you see that change the fetal heart rate, and then we've got to do something. And then they get a baby that's perfectly fine from a C section and they say, great, we saved your baby, And actually it was all the iatrogenic stuff that happened in the first place. Midwives, on the other hand, is because they trustpers so well and they accept uncertainty. And I can tell you from experience, and
I've been doing this forly forty years. The first twenty eight of them I was in the hospital, the last twelve or thirteen I was in the home birth world. We don't see that sudden deterioration of fetal status that you see in the hospital when you don't meddle with mother nature.
Yeah, and you know, I think we really underste how you come into the world is important. And I just I wish more women knew that this was an option, even because a lot of women they would never even you know, it's become like a It feels like people are like ooh, this like kind of alternative, like woo woo, you know, like, oh, you're very odd you had a home birth. And I was like, I don't know, I just maybe maybe I'm lazy.
No, I mean, people will often this is an interesting thing when when we talk on the podcast we talk about the c setur raping too high or epidural raping too high. We'll get letters or direct messages or whatever, but tell us that we're shaming somebody. We're not shaming anybody, but they're starting to project a little bit of their own guilt on the fact that maybe things didn't go
the way they wanted to. All we want to do is let people know that they have these choices and these options, and that's not something you're getting in the medical model. You can't do in a five minute, six minute prenatal visit what a midwife does in an hour
prenatal visit. You just can't. And I feel for my colleagues that are sort of in the hamster wheel of the medical model that they can't get out because the one thing that's really happened that in my lifetime that I saw there was really bad was doctors became employees of hospitals and hospital systems, and then their loyalty and their fiduciary duty becamemise because as a solo practitioner, my
responsibility is the woman that I'm caring for. As a doctor working in a hospital setting, if they don't want you to do vbacks bagial birth after sincerity where they don't want you to let anyone go past forty one weeks, then you'll have to skew your counseling to get the woman to do what your system wants to do, not what the doctor wants to do. And you know, I don't know that there's a lot of happy obstetricians out there.
I don't think that a lot of them really like what they do, and that's why a lot of them give up. Obe they go through all that training and then they come out and they just don't want to do it anymore. A lot of nurses leave nursing, they leave ob nursing because they just can't watch what goes on there.
And my experience with a midwife is that I got a lot of prenatal care but which is very important, but I also got a lot of post natal care, which is also very important.
Now.
My midwife came to my house every day after the birth and then you know, like every couple days, and she was very involved in the after birth process, and I think that's also something that's missing. It's almost like you have the baby and then you're pushed out of the hospital literally in a wheelchair, and.
Then it's like naig luck, I'll see you in six weeks. Yeah.
Yeah. When I was a resident, you never see a normal birth as a resident because you're not watching women in labor. You're called to the deliver room or to the labor room when the nurses need you to do something, so they never watched like the sounds that you make, or the things that you're saying, the guttural sounds, or the movements that a woman that makes. You never know what the normal progress of labor is. So nothing is moving fast enough. So every time you're called to the room,
you're asked to do something. You put on a glove, you do a vagil exam, you order potocin, you rub your membranes, you do these things. And this is how young doctors are being trained to look at childbirth when they really should back off. Maybe fifteen percent of women need medicalized hospital based care. The other eighty five percent, if the hospitals would leave them alone, could do it without much intervention at all. The problem is is that
hospitals don't make money doing nothing. They make money doing something, and so there is they won't do that, and they just they will not leave a woman alone. And they can't make a hospital more home like adding curtains and a hardwood floor to a labor room doesn't make it more like home. They just they don't know how to leave a patient alone. They just don't know how to do it. And even calling them patients, I just made an error. We call them clients in our world because
they're not sick. It's like breathing or it's like digestion. These are these are innate functions of our body. They're primitive brain functions. Fortunately, most of us don't have to think about breathing or digestion. Can you imagine thinking breathe in, breathe out. You can't do that. But when you have pneumonia or when you have colitis, you need a doctor. But you don't need a doctor to breathe or to digest food, or to get pregnant, or to go through
your prenatal care, or to deliver a baby. These are all natural functions that nature has designed. And again I want to reiterate, every time you intervene in Mother Nature's design,
there is going to be consequences. Even my co host Bliss likes to say, even if when you walk in the room when a woman is in labor and you quietly ask them can I get you anything or how you're doing, you're actually bringing them out of their primitive brain into their cognitive brain and you're slowing down the labor process.
Yeah, it would be nice if we could just believe, you know, women can do it.
Well, I'm living proof that they can.
Yeah, I'm.
And I'm living proof that somebody who went through the medical model. You know, I was trained in a very academic program. I was actually very lucky because the program I worked at was affiliated with a very, very busy hospital. It's actually the busiest hospital in the country back in the early eighties, and so I learned the breach and twin, but I also learned that it was a medicalized process.
Only coming out and being open to the fact that I was approached by midwives to take their home birth transports. And I didn't do it because I thought Midworfrey was smart or homebirth was smart. I probably thought it was stupid,
like most doctors do. But I did it because I wanted to make money in those days, right, But I was pression enough to listen to what the midwives had to say and to learn from the women who were in labor that they didn't have all the things that I thought they needed and they still did fine, right right.
Yeah, amazing, it's amazing.
It's really, it really is amazing. Thank you so much for coming on to talk and thank you. Thank you for doing the work that you do.
I really appreciate it.
Welcome. Can I say one more thing good?
Today is my daughter's twenty seventh birthday, and I want to wish my daughter medal in a very happy birthday.
Happy birthday, Madelan.
Make sure to check out Doctor Sue's Birthday Instincts podcasting website. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back after day.
Thank you.
Yeah, story, thanks training. That's our show for tonight and my time is guest host. But if you want to catch me, check out my latest stand up series on Netflix.
It's great to be here and stay.
Tune Next week when you're guest host Charlie.
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