My Grandmothers Were Tied To Beds And Knocked Out To Give Birth, But Dolphins Are Dangerous?
I learned something on TikTok and it wasn’t a dance or a baby being possessed, it was about Igor Charkovsky, this Russian guy who in the 1970s was delivering babies with dolphins in the Black Sea and I thought wait, why have I never heard of this, why is there only one famous case when Dr. Gowri Motha delivered a baby with six dolphins in Israel in 1990 and Israeli health authorities immediately banned it afterward. If it’s harmless nonsense why ban it? Why not just let people waste money like they do on juice cleanses?
I have had three children. Naturally, I would have loved to have felt like I was dying in the Black Sea with dolphins instead of on my back with my legs in stirrups vomiting onto my own stomach. I see how the medical community has never served women. My grandmothers both told me they were tied to beds, gassed and woke up with babies in the 1940s and 50s. What the fuck does that mean? Does that sound dangerous? But somehow dolphins in warm water is the dangerous option?
They literally used to strap women down and knock them unconscious for childbirth and called it twilight sleep. Like a spa treatment name for medical assault. Oh, you’re having contractions? Let me just tie your wrists to the bed and pump you full of scopolamine until you can’t remember your own name. Your grandmother woke up three days later like “Surprise! You have a baby and also maybe brain damage!” But yeah, dolphins are definitely the unscientific choice here.
And it’s not just birth. ADHD in women wasn’t properly recognized until recently because all the research was done on hyperactive boys. So for decades women were told they were just anxious or lazy or dramatic when they actually had a neurological condition. The menstrual cycle? Barely researched. They know more about erectile dysfunction than periods. There are seventeen FDA-approved treatments for male pattern baldness and women are still told menstrual pain is normal. “Just take some Midol and deal with it for forty years.”
I’ve always questioned authority because people with badges need to explain how they got those badges. Was it a multiple choice questionnaire? The same medical establishment calling dolphin birth dangerous used to prescribe cocaine for headaches and told pregnant women smoking was good for their nerves. They used to perform hysterectomies for “hysteria.” They thought the wandering uterus was a legitimate medical diagnosis. These are the same people who thought lobotomies were Nobel Prize-worthy medicine. Who performed experimental surgeries on enslaved women without anesthesia. Who told us our wombs would fall out if we rode bicycles. So when they label something pseudoscience I want to know who is making that call, what they’re selling instead, and why I should trust people who spent centuries getting everything about women completely wrong.
Here’s what I found: dolphins actually can detect pregnancy through echolocation. That’s real science. Their sonar operates at frequencies similar to medical ultrasound. Dolphin brains are larger than human brains relative to body size and they can regenerate brain tissue after injury. So maybe when that TikTok guy said dolphins were using therapeutic frequencies to help with labor, maybe that’s not completely insane? Remember, this isn’t directly about the dolphins.
What bothers me is that when Igor Charkovsky was doing dolphin births in Russia, they called it dangerous. When mothers traveled to Hawaii for dolphin births at the Sirius Institute, they were called crazy. When Sarah Evans delivered her son Samuel with dolphins in Israel and he hit developmental milestones faster than normal, instead of investigating, they banned the practice. That pattern of