Annnnnd I think I'm done with pregnancy activist books. :D

This book took a different slant than others. First, this is an OB-GYN writing. So you can't pull the midwife bias here. But I was blindsided by the force of his argument-- which is basically that prenatal care does very little good for either the mother or the baby and, in order to fix the problem we need to either stop wasting money on every other week visits and testing that has no valid scientific studies to back it up, or we need to improve our studies, our science, and our research to make prenatal care worth the time and money that people and insurance companies pay.

Secondly, and this was music to my medical activist soul, he went through the problems of malpractice, insurance, and government involvement in medical care. Take that, and apply it to almost any field of medicine, and you have what is wrong with our system today. His studies of Medicare and Medicaid programs were particularly chilling... and worth reviewing before you vote next year.

His view of women and women in scientific studies was telling. "A woman," he says, "is basically medically invisible unless she is pregnant," which is why all our struggles, as a society, with infertility and pre-conception care are basically guesswork and rarely covered by insurance (after all, any logical reason you can give to refuse care and save thousands of dollars is valid and I totally see that point as someone who has spent way too much time in business).

Granted, he published this about 10 years ago so there are probably more studies available now. But not the 40 years worth of research that backs up others.* He provides a fairly neutral view, though. He provides rebuttals, counterpoints, etc. It's worth reading slowly.

His final conclusion, apart from the points I mentioned about improving our care and research, is that most pregnant women...

wait for it...

would be better with a midwife.

Go figure.

*I was on a forum and found a heartbreaking note from someone who who (according to her) was given Cytotec to speed up contractions. From all the recent research there is, shouldn't she have been warned before giving birth that they can cause birth defects? Made me sad. Yet, judging by the tone and the content of the note, it totally backs up his point about bias in medical care. ( )