Is this even legal? Nataša Vukićević teaches the future parents about parenthood
By: Darko Maksimović
Tags: Birth, Serbia, Pseudoscience, Charlatan, Pregnancy

In the middle of Belgrade there was a meeting / lecture for the future moms and dads, given by none other than a person coming from the marketing area (Nataša Vukićević), who mostly works with selling baby equipment and she did not miss the opportunity to advertise about this at the beginning of the meeting.

To make things even worse, Nataša based her lecture on works of a certain Slovak, non-graduated student of programming who in his 28th year of life, without the intention to pursuit any formal education about it, decided to start giving lectures to future mothers, because allegedly he made contact with the traumas he had while he was still in his mom’s belly and decided to work with the so called “non-hypnotic regression therapy” (when you look it up, you mostly find results about the techniques for connecting with your soul in its past lives, but Patrik used this to connect with the memories from the period when you were still in the uterus).

She goes on mentioning certain analogies between the first trimester of pregnancy and the baby’s first decade of life, the second trimester and the teenage age, etc. all without any scientific proof or reference, based on “makes sense” and “Patrik says, and I believe him” (she actually repeats this literally several times). I look around me and see the future moms and I feel sorry to see them nodding their heads like they are learning something important for their babies.

Then Nataša takes a whiteboard and draws certain lines how levels of hormones move within one menstral cycle. She too doesn’t have any education in this or knowledge about it, but that doesn’t stop her from drawing big conclusions about the behavior of every woman during one month based on these “three most important hormones” (other hormones, as she says, are not important in this context).

And then the major shock— Nataša informs us that she is one of the founders of the magazine “Parenthood of the New Age” (Serbian “Roditeljstvo novog doba”), and that earlier she participated in publishing some other parenthood magazines, I don’t remember the names. I’m thinking “And I could buy some of these magazines, believing how they are written by doctors, psychologists and pedagogues, but here it is…”. And not only that, she’s often a guest in various TV shows…

As the lecture goes forward, I’m shocked more and more. These people invite the attendees to take private 2-hour long “psychotherapy” sessions with them, by the method of Patrik Balint — is this even legal? I look at her and think “And imagine if now in front of me there was a real doctor or a psychologist with a wealth of advices based on studies and experience?”. But no, it’s my fault, I came here by my self. I’m in the middle of that group and feel awkward to walk out, I’ll wait, I want to know what happens next anyway.

Then they invite women not to have a doctor at their birth and that the best way is to give birth at home, with just a midwife. That’s apparently a “natural” birth, that will be the best, “Patrik says, and I believe him”, “and the formal medicine as much as it helps, it …” By the way, this woman in her past-middle age gave birth twice by her own admission in normal hospital conditions with a doctor present, but she advises new moms not to go that way, thinking that she would do it differently today.

Stories about mares giving birth by themselves, zebras to which only the mail-zebra helps when they give birth etc. Later I investigated the statistics available on the internet and found some on the Reuters’ website (link), in which it is said that in the United States on every 10.000 babies born in house conditions, 13.5 babies dies in contract to 5.8 in hospital conditions. Mostly infections and oxygen deprivation problems which can be taken care of in hospitals.

I’m getting an urge during that lecture to stand up and say to these men and women, “guys don’t mess with this and listen to these charlatans, to go give birth in caves like a zebra, instead of utilizing thousands of years of medical science and experience and the available medical staff”. But looking around myself, I see (fortunately) the little number of attendees who look at their guru with the bliss in their eyes, getting exactly what they want to hear.

Who are all these people giving the lectures, even publicly and in an organized manner? How uneducated the public is when they listen to these “influencers” and “life coaches”, and let them mess with life-important matters? Just these days in Serbia we had a victim from Macedonia to that guy “doctor” Miroljub Petrović. Should lectures like these and self-organized therapies be in the domain of the freedom of speech, when they can cost people’s lives?