Birthing Wars

Aaron Baca

Despite trends to make hospital birthing centers appear as comfortable as a country bed-and-breakfast, maternity wards have become a battleground where doctors and insurance companies wrestle against women and their midwives over how best to manage American child birthing practices, Georgia State sociologist Wendy Simonds concludes in her new book, Laboring On.

Released in January by Routledge Press of New York, Laboring On represents eight years of research into birthing practices commonly used in the United States. Simonds co-authored the book with Barbara Katz Rothman, a sociologist at the City University of New York, and Bari Meltzer Norman, a sociologist in Miami.

The authors paint a bleak picture of what's become of U.S. birthing practices. Modern medicine, the authors contend, exerts too much control over childbirth while natural birth practices that were becoming popular in the 1970s have been relegated to the fringes at most hospitals.

Simonds says childbirth has become "medicalized" to such an extent that practices commonly used today often inhibit natural bonding that used to occur between women and their babies.

Health care costs are rising, in part, because procedures such as cesarean sections (now used in almost 30 percent of all births, according to Simonds) and the use of epidural anesthesia are becoming more prevalent, Simonds argues.

"We think it would be preferable in most situations for women to be attended by midwives instead of doctors, and we think it would be better if most births occurred outside the hospital," Simonds says.

For their book, Simonds and her co-authors interviewed more than 100 midwives, doctors, nurses and women going through pregnancy. The authors pulled together numerous studies, many of which show that babies delivered by qualified midwives outside hospitals were shown to be as healthy, if not healthier, than babies delivered in hospitals.

Laboring On updates work by Rothman in her 1982 book In Labor.