RTE's just run a piece on Denis Walsh, who featured in a number of LJ comments in the middle of last year, and was in Dublin to give a similar cheerleading-for-natural-childbirth talk at a conference. They managed
not to describe him as as a "doctor" or "gynaecologist", this time around, without actually going quite so far as to say he was a "midwife"; nor did they explicitly comment on the "a man? how very dare he!" aspect. Brief interview clip of him, followed by a gynaecologist with the party line of "epidurals all 'round", and some off-topic editorialisation by Fergal Bowers about pathological pain
after delivery (which is clearly quite different from what DW is talking about). On balance, better than some of the coverage last time, worse than others, strong feeling of groundhog day.
I'd like to think that the responses would file themselves under "I think natural childbirth is the bee's knee/a load of dangerous codswallop/all right in its place)"; I suspect, however, that a fresh 'round of "speaker has the wrong kind of genitals/is a sexist sadist/should have distinctly sadistic (and frequently distinctly gendered) things done to him" may be more likely. Which if so, one can admittedly in large part ascribe to Walsh sticking to much the same script, so if he gets similar results...