So I'm the proud father of a new daughter, our first child (see pictures here), who was born very early Thursday morning. My wife was attended only by a midwife and nurses with no doctors and no drugs other than some antibiotics. Here's the odd thing-- our birth experience was completely bizarro by US standards, yet completely normal by the standards of almost every other industrialized country.

In the US, just 8% of births use midwives, yet midwives attend 90 percent of normal births in Germany and virtually all normal births in Denmark and France. There is a whole feminist view of the denial of women's autonomy involved in the history of shifting power over births in the US from a female-dominated widwife profession to a male-dominated obstretrician hierarchy, but along with the overall medicalization of birth, the changes also are part and parcel of the ridiculous costs of the US health care system. As Marsden Wagner, former director of Women's and Children's Health for the World Health Organization, recently wrote:

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