Postpartum Depression is a “Gift”
  July 24, 2025 Howdy, Meteor readers, I spent half my day in the waiting room of an auto shop watching reruns of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The things Olivia Benson has been through are insane; no wonder this show is such effective copaganda.  In today’s newsletter, we’ve got babies on the brain. Nona Willis Aronowitz, whose own baby is due any day now, explains the latest MAHA tomfoolery on postpartum depression and then asks three very important questions about baby sleep. Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONMAHA targets mamas: Earlier this week, an FDA panel discussing the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) during pregnancy made waves in the medical community–and not the good kind. It was so chock-full of misinformation and “MAHA talking points” that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) felt compelled to put out a statement calling the panel “alarmingly unbalanced” and accusing it of ignoring “the harms of untreated perinatal [before, during, and after birth] mood disorders in pregnancy.” A quick review of the accepted scientific facts here: Postpartum depression affects one in eight women; mental health conditions, including suicides and overdoses, are a leading cause of death in pregnant women; and maternal mental health has taken a nosedive in the last few years. Meanwhile, there’s medical consensus that the small risks of taking SSRIs during pregnancy are far outweighed by the serious risks of untreated depression. Yet the vast majority of panel participants repeated widely debunked lies about the dangers of taking SSRIs while pregnant, claiming that the medications pose an increased risk of autism (they don’t), as well as preterm birth, pre-eclampsia, and postpartum hemorrhage (the effects are negligible). Even more enragingly, as Mother Jones’ Julianne McShane pointed out, several of these “experts” seemed to deny the gravity and even existence of the reason many patients might choose antidepressants to begin with: perinatal depression itself. Dr. Roger McFillin, a psychologist and anti-vaccine advocate, suggested that women are “naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts,” not “symptoms of a disease.” FDA Chief Dr. Martin Makary opted to discuss the “root causes” of perinatal depression, like the lack of “healthy relationships” and “natural light exposure,” rather than the immediate solutions patients need. And a third male panelist, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, who runs a clinic that helps people wean off psychiatric medications, claimed that symptoms of depression “are not things to be fixed with medical intervention.” As a very pregnant person who’s intimately aware of the havoc hormones can wreak, these words make my blood boil–no, incinerate. With my first child, I had clinical anxiety, both during and after my pregnancy. It cost me a lot: sleep, relaxation, closeness with my partner, peace with my baby. I’m a white, educated woman who’s squarely in the demographic of people who take SSRIs most frequently, yet the stigma was still too strong for me to seriously consider the drugs. I gutted it out for far too long, and it was tough to claw my way back. But halfway through this pregnancy, as the memory of those dark times loomed, I gingerly asked my midwife whether she thought a low dose of SSRIs would prevent a disastrous redo. It was only after she reassured me it was safe and effective, sending me links to several studies, that I started taking a prophylactic dose of Zoloft in preparation for birth. Among the FDA panel’s proposed solutions was to slap a black-box warning about the use of SSRIs during pregnancy. This kind of warning might very well have deterred me–someone with a lot of access to information. I can only imagine how many more suffering women it could discourage. Like many issues the MAHA movement focuses on, this one dovetails with legitimate concerns about the overprescribing of SSRIs and the lack of holistic support for people struggling with their mental health. Those are real problems. But steering new moms away from evidence-based help can only lead to harm. “So many women I see feel guilty about taking medications,” Dr. Nancy Byatt, a perinatal psychiatrist at the UMass Chan Medical School, told The New York Times after she watched the FDA panel. “They think they should ignore their needs for their babies. And I think it could make their decisions a lot harder … because it could cause unnecessary alarm.” The Department of Health and Human Services has refused to comment on future policy decisions, but in the meantime, you can still get accurate pregnancy information from ACOG and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
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 THE UNINSURED ICON. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 Three Questions About…Baby SleepWe spoke with Dr. Harvey Karp, inventor of the SNOO, about soothing the ills of modern parenthood.BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  DR. KARP, BABY WHISPERER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Whether or not you know Dr. Harvey Karp by name, you’ve probably absorbed his influence on baby sleep and soothing. The resurgence of the swaddle? The ubiquity of white noise in babies’ rooms? Cribbed (no pun intended) from Dr. Karp’s bestselling book The Happiest Baby on the Block. And he’s probably best known for SNOO, a pricey “smart bassinet” that rocks and jiggles a strapped-in baby all night long. In my ninth month of pregnancy, I spoke with Dr. Karp about the evolution of his signature product, what nuclear families are missing, and why sleep is a feminist issue. When SNOO first came out in 2016, it was a signifier of luxury–Beyoncé and Jay Z reportedly owned several. Now, it’s used in hospitals, including to soothe babies who were born dependent on opiates, and you’re working to have SNOO covered by Medicaid. That seems like quite a shift–how did that come about? Yes, SNOO was really known as this bougie baby bed in the beginning, but the goal was always to make it accessible to everyone. We built the bed to be reused over and over again. It’s sort of the way breast pumps started out: There were these industrial breast pumps and they were too expensive for people to buy, but you could rent them. And so, our goal was always to have SNOO be either rented or for free, and not to be purchased and owned. We have a project going on in Wisconsin right now, where hundreds of [SNOOs] are being given to families who have premature infants, mostly Medicaid recipients. Our job is to develop the science to convince Medicaid payers that we can save money and improve outcomes. We’ve also had a lot of success with companies offering SNOO as an employee benefit. Now, tens of thousands of people get a free SNOO rental from their employer, from big companies like Dunkin’ Donuts to the largest duck farm in America. You often say that SNOO can help replenish what we’ve lost in terms of the extended family and support for new parents. But I think some people still feel a little funny about swapping out human cuddles for a machine. What do you say to that? Yes, a hundred years ago, and for the entire history of humanity, we had extended families, and people lived right next door to their grandmother, their aunt, their sister, and everybody shared the work. Then we moved to the city or moved hours away from our family, and women got more work responsibilities outside the home. This became pretty crushing on parents, especially single parents. So the SNOO goal is to be a helper. It’s there in the home when you’re cooking dinner, when you’re taking a shower, when you’re playing with your three-year-old, when you are getting some sleep. It’s not set it and forget it, but it can give you 20 to 30 minutes here and there, as well as giving an extra hour or even up to two hours of extra sleep. In the womb, the baby is being held 24/7. Then they’re born, and 12 hours a day we put them in a dark quiet room. That’s sensory deprivation compared to what they had before they were born. So why, because you only have a few people in your family, should the baby miss out? SNOO…doesn’t replace what the parents would be doing, because no one can rock them all night long. It just gives the baby a little extra. When I had my first baby, sleep was a locus of inequality in my relationship–my male partner was obviously getting more of it, especially because I was riddled with anxiety about whether my baby was safe. Sleep became a feminist issue in my mind. How do you see SNOO responding to these gender dynamics, which seem to be common? We’ve definitely moved in the direction of gender equality, but we’re still far from it. Even when the baby is sleeping, sometimes moms are awake and anxious knowing that they have to get up in three hours. SNOO can help with that: There have been studies reporting that SNOO reduces maternal depression and maternal stress. There are five things that trigger depression and anxiety that SNOO improves: up to 41 minutes more sleep for mothers per night, reduced infant crying, less anxiety that the baby is in danger, the feeling that you have a support system, and [the fact that it] makes you feel like you’ve gotten things managed better. Also, men very often take on the role of being the sleep experts when they have a SNOO in the house. Men want to manage this gadget. That takes a burden off the shoulders of the mom. This conversation was made possible by Happiest Baby, a sponsor of UNDISTRACTED with Brittany Packnett Cunningham.  WEEKEND READING 📚On the boys: Everyone’s worried about young men, but are we maybe blowing the “boy crisis” out of proportion? (The New York Times) On boobs: We’re all thinking about them. And apparently so is American Eagle. (TCF Emails) On the genius invested in women’s sports: The WNBA is in the midst of negotiations for a better bargaining agreement. They’ve got a Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences on their side. (Sports Illustrated)  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
