Quotes from Jennifer Block

The context needs to be that the goal is a healthy mom. Because mothers never make decisions without thinking about that healthy baby. And to suggest otherwise is insulting and degrading and disrespectful.

She does not exist for herself. She exists for and through her community.

Among industrialized countries, the U.S. ranks 29th in infant survival.

mothers are not informed enough to know that this is not a good idea, and that any woman who has the right information would not want to have her baby induced.

The logic of episiotomy was that a second-degree tear would prevent a third- or fourth-degree tear, but studies conducted through the 1980s and 1990s found the opposite to be true. One study found that episiotomy makes such an injury nine times more likely.

Helen Sandland, an obstetrician in Wilmington, North Carolina, resigned in June 2005 after hospital administrators told her to increase her cesarean rate, which was a modest 10%.

These include longer hospital stay; longer and more painful recovery; higher risk of infection, organ damage, adhesions, hemorrhage, embolism, and hysterectomy; more blood loss; higher chance of rehospitalization; higher chance of a complication with the next pregnancy; less initial contact with the baby; less success breastfeeding; higher risk of respiratory problems for the baby; and twice the risk of the most catastrophic complication of all: maternal death.51

What they don't understand is that obstetricians are surgeons, and they know pathology, but they really suck at wellness." They are trained to sew up a tear, but not to prevent one.

A cesarean section is a wound that impedes normal digestive function, function that must resume following surgery. Breast milk is delayed. Seven layers of tissue and muscle are severed.

In the countries with the best maternal and infant outcomes—the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark—women and babies benefit from lifelong universal healthcare, but that care is markedly different: obstetricians attend only high-risk pregnancies. The vast majority of laboring women get individual support from a midwife, are free to move about and birth in whatever position feels best, and are rarely induced, anesthetized, or cut.

You know, all the methods for childbirth, whether it's Bradley or Lamaze, they've all been developed by men, ' she said. 'I don't want to sound like a feminist but it kind of bothers me because there's no real childbirth process or plan or whatever you want to call it that's been developed by a woman.

The following year, she quit. Several things were bothering her. Safety protocols seemed to have no bearing on actual practice; she saw too many women induced or wheeled to the operating room, she felt, because the floor needed a bed free or because the physician had to be somewhere...

A woman is four times more likely to die having a cesarean section than a vaginal birth.