The good news is that cost containment is likely to eventually lead hospitals back toward normal birth and the use of midwives. Midwifery care results in less intervention and fewer malpractice suits, and midwifery training costs less than physician training.

Note: The active management of labor and delivery has led to an epidemic of cesarean births at great costs to women and their children. A leading obstetrician has said "The most common cause of cesareans today is not fetal distress or maternal distress, but obstetric distress." If an epidemic is an outbreak of anything that spreads or increases rapidly - we certainly have an epidemic. The cesarean birth rate was three percent in the decade before 1970 when doctors saw cesareans as a last resort measure. Increasing just over one percent a year, nearly one-fourth of all births today are cesarean. While the chances are excellent, with a cesarean, that mother and baby will survive, it is not as safe as a vaginal delivery. Mother and baby are at high risk for complications - physical and emotional.

Sources

Suzanne Arms, Immaculate Deception II
Diana Korte & Roberta Scaer, A Good Birth, A Safe Birth
Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept
Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child

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