Judith Ann Lothian, PhD, and the Life of the Mind

Abstract

In this guest editorial, Dr. James Lothian, husband of Dr. Judith Lothian, longtime associate editor of the Journal of Perinatal Education shares his insights on what guided Judy’s thinking and how she went about doing research. These reflections are a welcome addition to the legacy that Judy Lothian left behind as a scholar, teacher, wife, mother, and dear friend.

The tributes in the last issue of the Journal of Perinatal Education to my wife Judy Lothian were both poignant and spot on (Budin, 2024). They captured very much of what Judy was and did and they did so quite eloquently. They were, however, largely mute with regard to her intellectual contributions, a very important feature of her life.

It is perhaps high time that I addressed that issue, not in a hagiographic way but simply as a description of what Judy accomplished on a scholarly level, what motivated her, and how she viewed scholarship more generally.

The underlying theme throughout Judy’s work was birth, mothers, and babies. The specific focal points of the articles, however, varied greatly. Home birth, birth practices, the mother–baby connection, problems surrounding epidurals and cesarean surgeries, preparation for labor and childbirth, and ASPO-Lamaze all featured prominently.

Two features of this writing stand out. One is its palpable concern for the well-being of mothers and babies. The writing is not at all distant—not the product of a clinician looking on from afar but rather of someone close to the event who is personally knowledgeable and empathetic. The second, and this is related to the first, is the critical tone that permeates discussions of some of the most common medical interventions in birthing and mother and infant care. Cesarean surgery, induction, and epidurals all fall under this heading, so too do things like separating mother and baby after birth.

The titles of some of her articles on these subjects pretty much say it all: “The cesarean catastrophe” (Lothian, 2006a) and “Saying ‘no’ to induction” (Lothian, 2006b). In a similar vein, see “‘Reality’ birth: Marketing fear to childbearing women (Lothian & Grauer, 2003) and “Healthy birth practice #4: avoid interventions unless they are medically necessary” (Lothian, 2019).

Judy viewed such interventionist practices as anathema because judged on the basis of the evidence they generally do more harm than good. In the Hayekian viewpoint (Hayek, 1979) underlying Judy’s analysis, moreover, they are simply scientistic intrusions into the hoariest human institutions of birth, one that has stood the test of time on its own. They ought not to have happened.

SOME FAMILIAL HISTORY

Judy and I in a good many ways followed similar intellectual paths. I got my doctorate a decade and a half earlier than she and, as a result, began my research and scholarly writing earlier, but once Judy got going, she never stopped teaching, writing, speaking, editing, and doing the other things that good academicians do up until she died. Hers was a remarkable intellectual journey, one that was accompanied by a remarkable series of intellectual accomplishments.

To add further perspective to the discussion, let me recollect a bit of familial history. Judy and I married in 1969 after I had finished my second year of doctoral studies in economics at the University of Chicago. She then joined me in Chicago and for the first year and a half worked in the pediatric intensive care unit at Michael Reese Hospital. After our second child, daughter Mary, was born, Judy stopped working and I began teaching as an adjunct in two local colleges. In the summer of 1972, I took a job in the economics department of Citibank and we moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where we remained ever afterward. I received my doctoral degree that next summer.

When we made the move to New York, we had two little ones in tow and a third about to be born. Not long after the birth of that third child, our son John, Judy began teaching childbirth classes. That teaching continued in one form or another throughout her career. Coupled with her own experience of giving birth naturally, it factored importantly into her subsequent research agenda.

EXPERIENCE AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Somewhere in the mid- to late-1970s, Judy and Caroline Donahue, whom she had met through childbirth teaching, decided to pursue master’s degrees in nursing at New York University (NYU). In 1981, they both received those degrees. I have a picture of the two of them as 30 somethings in caps and gowns in Washington Square Park, the then-standard venue for NYU graduations. Five years or so later, Judy enrolled in the doctoral program in nursing at NYU, receiving her PhD in 1989 and writing a quite path-breaking but I believe underappreciated, dissertation entitled “Continuing to breastfeed” (Lothian, 1989). Judy published an article summarizing this study and its findings “It takes two to breastfeed. The baby’s role in successful breastfeeding” in the Journal of Nurse Midwifery some years later (Lothian, 1995).

Judy’s doctoral work set the stage for much of her research and scholarly writing. The overall theme of this research was childbirth and mothering. We talked about these issues many times at the dinner table and elsewhere. So, I believe that I have quite a good insight into Judy’s thinking and how she went about doing research. The best way I can describe it is that one thing led to another. There was no grand design before the fact. This lack of a grand design is not at all unique in the realm of scholarship. My excursion into intellectual biography, in a series of articles describing the work of Nobelist Milton Friedman, my teacher and dissertation advisor, points to the same thing (e.g., Lothian, 2016; Lothian & Tavlas, 2018). There were connections between various research topics but an evolution of his research agenda rather than an underlying master plan at the outset in Friedman’s case as in Judy’s one thing simply led to another. But this is the way science proceeds. One has an initial hypothesis that one confronts with the data. This empirical confrontation causes that initial hypothesis to be revised and otherwise amended. Then the process proceeds. It is one of successive approximations.

Judy had always been a good student and an avid reader. The nursing program at Catholic University when she and I studied there was a rigorous one, which had six courses per semester with an extra ninth summer semester thrown in—the usual nursing and science courses coupled with a very healthy dose of courses in liberal arts—history, English, philosophy, and religious education being primary. She came away from that experience with a great appreciation for university education.

Her experience at NYU added to that. Indeed it left an indelible mark upon her. At NYU, she had a number of excellent professors who helped her solidify her thinking about nursing research and research more generally and a coterie of intellectually stimulating fellow doctoral students with whom she continually interacted. She was taught sound scientific methodology and its philosophical underpinnings.

One of the authors to whom she was exposed was the Nobelist economist and social thinker Friedrich Hayek. She found Hayek’s discussion of the limitations of human knowledge and the complexity of economic and other human institutions extremely attractive intellectually. She regarded his critique of “scientism,” the unthinking application of the methods of the physical sciences to social phenomena, as completely valid and applicable to much research in nursing (Hayek, 1978, 1979). These and related topics were a regular feature of family dinner-table discussions. Her attraction to Hayekian ideas was something that as a Chicago-educated economist I shared. The belief in the complexity of human institutions, and the distrust of scientism, moreover, was quite consonant with the views of Martha Rogers, the highly influential nursing theorist then resident at NYU. Most important from the standpoint of this discussion, they were an important reason Judy adopted the ethnographic research design of her dissertation.

When in 1989 Judy received her doctorate, it was a year and a half after the birth of our youngest child Elizabeth. That was a decade and a half after I received my own doctorate. She was 44 years old at the time—a relatively late start. The fact that she persevered and hit the ground running once she got her doctorate is the first remarkable feature of her intellectual journey. The second is the extent and continuity of her scholarly writing thereafter.

RESEARCH AND WRITING

In her doctoral dissertation, “Continuing to Breastfeed,” she followed five couples expecting their first child through the second and third trimesters of pregnancy and for 6 months postpartum (Lothian, 1989). Using the methods of grounded theory, she generated hypotheses and a model to explain the duration of breastfeeding. Her purpose in the study was to develop a better understanding of the process of breastfeeding. The specific focus of the study evolved to be “what are the factors that influence women to choose to breastfeed? " and “what factors influence women to continue to breastfeed?” Her major finding—and it was an important one—was that the baby mattered greatly. If the baby lacked the physical ability to latch on and suck, breastfeeding ended. That sounds like an obvious conclusion but the literature of the time ignored the baby’s role completely. So as it often is in science more broadly, something only becomes obvious when a researcher shows it to be so.

“Continuing to Breastfeed,” set the stage for Judy’s subsequent career in terms of both her focus on birth-related issues and her advocacy of ethnographic research designs. She felt the latter particularly suitable in nursing for two reasons—the unsettled nature of nursing theory and the situations encountered in much of nursing research. Such situations she believed were often too much mathematically complex for simple bivariate statistical approaches like correlation analysis. Simple formulations like if X then Y very often would not work for both because there were too many X’s—some unknown, others difficult to measure—and the relationships linking those X’s to Y were extraordinarily difficult to specify even when all the X’s were known. That phraseology is much more mine than hers but she would I believe agree with my overall characterization of the situation surrounding much nursing research.

In addition to “Continuing to Breastfeed,” Judy’s scholarly output included one book, Giving Birth With Confidence coauthored with Charlotte DeVries (Lothian & DeVries, 2017), now in its third edition and, by my count, over 80 scholarly articles. People paid attention to those writings, moreover. At the latest count according to Google Scholar, which keeps track of such things, her work has received close to 2,000 citations in the scholarly literature. Her intellectual influence, moreover, extended well beyond those scholarly citations. An alternative source of data on scholarly output, ResearchGate, lists fewer of her articles and attributes 1,000 citations to her articles along with 5,000 reads. I strongly suspect that that latter figure is very much a lower bound. Many of Judy’s articles are comprehensible not just by academicians but by practitioners interested in the subjects of childbirth, babies, and mothering. Many of these articles are available on websites like PubMed and Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric, and Neonatal Nurses with wide, rather diverse audiences. Judy’s most cited article has been “Promoting, protecting, and supporting normal birth: A look at the evidence,” written with Amy Romano and published in the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic and Neonatal Nursing (2008). The two present evidence showing that interferences with the normal physiological process of labor and birth and absent medical necessity, are simply harmful, increasing the risk of complications for both mother and baby. They go on to propose a series of evidence-based changes in care practices that they argue will do the opposite, reduce risk, promote normal physiological birth, and greatly improve the experience of both mothers and babies.

This article has received 383 citations. Ten more of Judy’s articles have received 50 or more citations and another 15 have received 20 or more citations. Most of the rest have been cited at least five times.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

I have traced the path that Judy followed in becoming a professor and a scholar. And I have briefly reviewed her research and writing. Now I would like to flesh out the overall picture a bit.

The best way I can summarize it is that Judy lived the life of the mind in the broadest sense. She read omnivorously. When she was young, her mother joked that she always had her nose in a book. Not much changed thereafter as I and the rest of her family can attest. English, Irish, and American literature, philosophy, and theology were all part of her purview. And then there were her omnipresent mystery novels. She was also an opera lover. She was a devotee of the theater, not only in America but in England and in Ireland too. She loved music. She loved art and she loved the greatest of artworks, the traditional Catholic liturgy in all its solemnity and splendor. She became friends with the priest community of scholars at Seton Hall University and also with my Jesuit priest-professor colleagues at Fordham. The latter were frequent dinner guests at our house in Brooklyn. We also hosted each at our house in Ireland as we have our parish priest in Goleen, West Cork on numerous occasions. These were times for comradery but also for considering the permanent things.

In this regard, Christopher Cullen, S.J., our Jesuit friend who celebrated Judy’s requiem mass wrote in his homily “Indeed, there is not a semester in the last 20 years that I have not had a splendid banquet at Chez Lothian. Always, superb meals, excellent wines, and the sweetest of gifts—the conversation of good friends, united in the unchanging and ancient Faith.”

Judy’s scholarship came from deep within. Judy was a woman of letters with wide intellectual interests, a conversationalist, a hostess par excellence, a productive scholarly writer, and a devoted wife and mother.

Biography

JAMES R. LOTHIAN is a Distinguished Professor of Finance in Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business and holder of the Toppeta Family Chair in Global Financial Markets. He is the director of Fordham's Frank J. Petrilli Center for Research in International Finance. For two and a half decades he served as editor of the Journal of International Money and Finance. He holds a doctorate and an MA in economics from the University of Chicago and BA magna cum laude from the Catholic University of America.

Funding Statement

FUNDING The author received no specific grant or financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

DISCLOSURE

The author has no relevant financial interest or affiliations with any commercial interests related to the subjects discussed within this article.