to help us again today and to bring obstetricians perspective um stew do you want to introduce yourself to those of our audience who don't know who you are i think most will but just in case

Yeah, just briefly, my name is Stuart Fishbein.

I'm an obstetrician.

I'm semi-retired at this point, but my career began in medical school at the University of Minnesota and I did my residency in Southern California at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where I had the good fortune of being affiliated with a very, very busy hospital called Los Angeles County University of Southern California Women's Hospital, where they were doing about 22,000 births a year there, which is about 65 babies a day.

And I was there for four months every other day, so you can do the math.

And I got very well trained in all the things that in the early 1980s were just considered variations of normal, which was breach and twins.

And those associated things, use of forceps, vacuums, hands-on stuff, that kind of thing, came out.

Are they? Yeah, everything had to fall into place for me.

Dr. Stu, what do you wish more women understood about group B strep colonization versus infection? Yeah,

so you're getting right to it.

I want people to understand that I was a traditionally trained OBGYN.

I came out very medically oriented person.

and thinking like most of my OB colleagues still do to this day, kind of stuck in a hamster wheel.

And the only reason that I've evolved to where I am today is because I had the good fortune of being approached by some midwives early in my career and asked if I would take their home birth transports.

In California, We try to have collaborative relationships.

I think that's a great point to close today's conversation on is, you know, what does true informed consent and birth actually look like, especially for a mother who wants to allow her body to move through physiological birth? What would you leave our audience with today?

So sorry for interrupting you.

No, no, that's fine.

So then I finished my residency and I and I was offered a position with a other group of doctors, not as a group, but as a solo practitioner sharing office overhead and that kind of thing, but not being a part of a group where, you know, I'm the low man on the totem pole or anything like that.

I built my own practice from scratch.

That's one thing that's just pretty much disappeared from medicine anymore is the private practice physician.

It's making a bit of a comeback because people are wisening up and realizing that the conflicts of interest and the conflicts of fiduciary duty that occur when a physician is employed by a hospital, but is supposed to honor the decisions made by her patient.

Or his patient, but he can't because the system he works for doesn't allow like VBAC or doesn't allow breach delivery or doesn't allow women to go past 41 weeks.

So what have you learned about women in watching us go through this, this powerful transition in our lives, this rite of passage?