This is just anecdotally what happened with my pregnancy and birth. I wanted a midwife and was all set to use a birthing center about 45 minutes from my home. They saw me for initial visits and were wonderful. Offered me everything the conventional OBGYNs do. They answered all my questions and held a wonderful, free…

I’ll just give you my own experience, FWIW. I lived in a smallish California town in the Central Valley. There were three places you could go for ob/gyn care -only one of which took MediCal, so it was inundated with those who needed it. So, that really left me with two places unless I wanted to be waiting two hours…

You are woefully uninformed. A one month rotation teaches you next to nothing about this subject.

Wow, a whole month rotation! I like how you “strongly disagree” with many of the author’s anecdotal assertions based on your own anecdotal experiences!

Sarcasm aside, I honestly am happy that the teaching hospital you were at seemed to be doing things the right way.

This article was very informative and well-written.…

I’m glad to hear that there are hospitals moving in this direction, but my experience and the experiences of my friends (in Arizona, so...) is that they largely are not. I had two home births, and then a third which ended in a hospital transfer.

As a man who has never given birth, I can’t speak to to the specifics of your reply as it pertains to childbirth, but as someone with multiple siblings and parents with special needs and a wide variety of medical issues, I can absolutely speak to how I have seen the overwhelming majority of doctors and nurses behave.

That’s great! It sounds like you work at one of the hospitals where there is a high standard of care and emphasis placed on informed consent. However, the 33-34% C-section rate in the US, in direct contravention to the “ideal” rate propounded by the WHO of 5-10%, begs to differ for most hospitals. Although you are…

It makes me happy to hear about the evidence-based focus at your teaching hospital. I know that’s becoming more common, and that’s a very good thing. Generalizations about “most midwives” and “most OBs” like I did here are sort of unfair—there are lots of great doctors, and probably lots of crappy midwives too.

I’m in a similar situation and have found OBG’s by and large seem to fall into 2 types: the ones who are more respectful of patient autonomy and evidence-based (these tend to be under 50 and female), whereas in the second category there are still a lot of the authoritarian types who “we’ve always done it this way” -…

As a Canadian mom who had midwives at all three of my sons’ births, I heartily second your recommendations. I ended up transferring from home to hospital when my labour with my first son stalled out around the 18th hour, and had an epidural there, but my second and third deliveries were short, uncomplicated waterbirths