Watch Sunday night at 6.30 on 7 tonight!!!

[sunshine_sieben]

Mmmmm, I know this is an old thread. But I have had a thought about it recently, sparked by a post Kelly wrote about Breastfeeding.
Her point was that if someone presents both sides of the sory, but subtely (sp?) steers you in one direction over the other, his argument is even stronger. At least that's how I read it.

Why do the commercial baby milk companies offer pro and con lists that acknowledge some of their product's shortcomings? Because any "balanced" approach that is presented in a heavily biased culture automatically supports the bias. If A and B are nearly equivalent, and if more than 90% of mothers ultimately choose B, as mothers in the United States do (according to an unpublished 1992 Mothers' Survey by Ross Laboratories that indicated fewer than 10% of U.S. mothers nursing at a year), it makes sense to follow the majority. If there were an important difference, surely the health profession would make a point of not staying out of the decision-making process.

Taken from "Breasfeeding is NOT best" https://www.bellybelly.com.au/forums...-not-best.html

I think this sort of applies here, too.
If they had only shown one side of the story, many people would have recognised the open bias and not taken the piece too seriously.
However, since they made an effort to present both sides, the conclusion that HB is dangerous is "obviously" correct and the argument has much more weight. The fully informed audience is coming to this conclusion all on its own.

It is like the OB who says that he is pro-natural birth and then starts talking c/s at 28 weeks because the baby is too larg, the pelvis too smal or any other arbitrary reason why this particular woman is "not suitable" for a natural birth. Had he said right from the start that he thinks that c/s are the gold standard of birth, the woman could have made the decision to seek out a less biased OB.