VSRF LIVE TONIGHT: Episode 208 with Dr. Adam Urato, MD.
Thursday, December 18: 7pm Eastern | 4pm Pacific
Tonight on VSRF Live, we’re tackling a subject that affects countless women, yet is rarely discussed with the honesty it deserves, the widespread use of antidepressants and other medications during pregnancy, and the lack of clear, honest risk–benefit discussions surrounding their use.
We’re joined by Dr. Adam Urato, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and maternal-fetal medicine physician with nearly 30 years of experience caring for pregnant women, including the most high-risk cases. Over his career, Dr. Urato has become a leading voice questioning the routine prescribing of medications during pregnancy, often in the absence of meaningful informed consent.
Dr. Urato has written and lectured extensively on medication exposures during pregnancy and has not shied away from challenging entrenched practices in obstetrics. His work helped expose the failures of Makena, a drug once widely promoted to prevent preterm birth and ultimately pulled from the market by the FDA in 2023.
What sets Dr. Urato apart is his willingness to say what too few physicians are willing to say out loud: protecting maternal mental health and protecting developing babies are not opposing goals, but both require honest, evidence-based conversations about risk.
Tonight, we’ll discuss:
Why antidepressants and other medications are so commonly prescribed during pregnancy
What the data actually show, and where the evidence is thin or missing
Why women are often not told the full story about potential risks
And why Dr. Urato returns again and again to a simple but uncomfortable truth: chemicals have consequences
I hope you’ll join us tonight for a look at how pregnancy care intersects with mental health and whether women are being given the full picture. Bring your questions and bring a friend!
Steve
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Can’t wait to watch, thank you . 😊
I'm partway through listening to this interview and am mesmerized. I'm a therapist with 35 years in the field. For years, woman after woman has come in and reported that her Dr told her that antidepressants in pregnancy are "fine, and the baby won't be harmed," and that depression in the mother is also not good for the baby (well, I do happen to agree with that second part.)
Re: informed consent/lack thereof, phew, lots to say. 1) It has always been totally lacking in labor and delivery. I was with a lot of laboring women when I was a birthparent counselor in an adoption agency. The nurse would just waltz in, and while adding a fluid bag to the IV, would make a comment like, "you're doing great, sweetheart. I'm just adding a little something to (help labor along, relax you, name your desired result). I never heard anything like "would you like a little something to . .. .?) nor did I ever hear what is true: If I give you an epidural/pitocin/whatever, the benefit is X, the potential drawback is Y, what are your thoughts/questions/what do you choose?"
I worked with a birthmom in the late 90s. She had been advised to terminate her pregnancy early in the pregnancy due to scans showing that the baby was missing half of its brain, either cerebellum or cerebrum, I can't remember which. She was told that he would essentially be a vegetable and would live several months at most. She declined to have the pregnancy terminated - long story, but part of it was fear of having her tubes tied against her will if she were to agree to a termination. At the time I chalked it up to some severe mental health history and some circumstances unique to her that increased her paranoia around this concern.
Fast forward 25 years, and I find out that the obstetrician who delivered me in the late 60s subsequently lost his medical license for . . .tying women's tubes during delivery without their consent. My Mom - who told me that she and my Dad had originally planned to have 4 kids, and I was only the second one - had her tubes were tied sometime within a few months of my birth.
Given that Mom spent the first year of my life incarcerated at Spring Grove Hospital (psych facility in Maryland), there's no way she gave a true informed consent. Because if you're not well enough to go home and care for your newborn, then you're not well enough to consent to an irreversible surgery.
And the baby I mentioned in the late 90s: he was born and appeared to be a totally normal newborn, which freaked out the medical team to no end. They pulled her scans from early pregnancy and, sure enough, the scans showed an absence of half the brain. The little guy had care at a hospital outside of Baltimore and follow up at Johns Hopkins: he was fine, and the Drs had zero explanation, they were mystified.
About iatrogenic deaths being the third leading cause of death in the U.S., and the utter complacency/collective shoulder shrugging our society has about that well known, undisputed fact? I simply don't get it.
It's completely unclear to me why everyone accepts that pilots and long haul truckers must by law have 8 consecutive hours off every 24 hours for safety purposes . .. but it's OK to let Drs who are making life and death decisions do so after having been awake for 36 hours?
It's utter madness. Sheer insanity. Yet the majority of people forcibly ram their heads into the sand and brightly announce their confidence in their Dr and our medical care.
Thank you so much, Steve, for your tireless work and dogged persistence with your work. I truly appreciate it.