HW 38 - Insights from pregnancy & birth book - part 1

1. The Author starts out describing some of the major flaws in the birth "industry," then slowly breaks them down into catagories, which he explains in detail. Then he goes into the history of birth, which leads him into what can be done to fix the way it is now so it can be safe and natural.
2. The Question that the author is attempting to answer with this book is: What are the flaws in the birthing industry and what can be done to correct them? Something that i thought would be an appropriate answer would be as simple as lemmings (metaphorically speaking). As a society we are becoming more and more like a pack of lemmings, in which we mindlessly follow each other through the birth process and just do what the person in front of us did and hopefully we make it out okay, not really asking why we did what we did.
3. The major insight that the book has in the first 100 pages is that we are being abused by our health care system. I did not find that to be all that much of an insight, but apparently doctors are abusing their power as doctors and doing what they think is best, when in fact, surgery is not the answer to everything. Potentially harmful practices take place every day in order to speed a women through labor and get her back out of the hospital. I don't feel that this comes as much of a shock, especially after the Health Care unit.
4. 
   

• Fact 1: Midwives attend 70% of births in Europe and Japan, but only 7% in America
• Fact 2: United States has the second worst newborn/maternal mortality rate of the developed world
• Fact 3: In 1955 less then 1% of all births took place at home, and it is still that way today.
• Fact 4: Hospitals aren't legally obligated to give patients statistics of the types of births and information related.
• Fact 5: Doctors regularly give women Pitocin to speed up the birth process, often damaging the women's uterus and potentially killing the baby, so they can have the baby faster for themselves.

5. Marsden Wagner is very good about the way he uses evidence. He doesn't put the source of every citation on the page, but he created a index type bibliography where the words are defined and the sources are expressed. Personally i feel that it is a good way because of the way he personalizes it and makes it more user friendly. It keeps the flow and is easily accessible