When Facts Aren’t Enough: Correcting Obstetric Misinformation Without Losing Trust

Pregnant women are drowning in bad information. Social media is partially responsible.

Pregnant women are drowning in bad information. Social media says epidurals cause autism. TikTok claims induction always ends in C-section. Birth blogs insist continuous monitoring is just hospital protocol, not medical necessity.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of this isn’t spread by bad actors. It’s shared by mothers who had traumatic births, by doulas who watched patients get dismissed, by women who were pressured or ignored. They’re trying to protect others from what happened to them.

And obstetrics earned this distrust.

For decades, we told women what would happen to their bodies instead of asking. We brushed aside concerns. We overruled preferences. Black women reported symptoms and were ignored. That history doesn’t disappear because guidelines changed.

When I challenge misinformation, I try to remember something: Your doctor isn’t lying to you—they’re telling you what they were taught. The problem is what they were taught. That applies to me too. I’ve had to unlearn things. The evidence forced me to.

When someone says ‘the science is settled,’ ask them: settled by whom, and when did they last check?

That’s not anti-science. That’s how science works. And when we show data that contradicts what patients have heard, I’m honest about it: I’m not here to scare you. I’m here because no one else is showing you this data.

An important trial said inducing low-risk mothers at 39 weeks would lower C-section rates. Hospitals adopted it nationwide. The clinical trial done under optimal conditions worked worked on about 3,000 patients. The question is why it didn’t work for millions of real births. When we analyzed real data, cesarean rates went up, not down. The real world didn’t match the study.

Does that mean the trial was fraudulent? No. It means implementation matters. Context matters. If a treatment works in a study but not in a country, we don’t have a patient problem—we have a healthcare system problem.

This is why simply stating facts fails. If your correction sounds like the same dismissive tone patients encountered before, they stop listening. You’ve lost them—not because your data was wrong, but because your delivery echoed their trauma.

Effective correction sounds different:

“That was standard teaching for years. The evidence changed. Let me show you what surprised me.”

Evidence matters. But so do the people we’re trying to reach. Kindness isn’t the opposite of rigor—it’s what makes rigor effective.