HOMEWORK 38

The book is organized so that the beginning of the chapter tells the reader what the chapter is going to be about in a few general words. Under this there are a few quotes or something to give a brief insight to what the author might say and then it goes to the author’s actual writing.

The book tries to answer the question, “How is birth done in America?” being part of the medical field himself the author has a lot of different perspectives but I think that many parts of the book the author is actually telling more of the nightmarish side of the birthing process. The beginning of the book talks about the death of a baby during labor and I think a book that is talking about birth’s initial writing should have to do with the opposite being death. The book should be less bias then it seems to be because it gives the reader more to think about.

The major insights that the book tries to get across in the first 100 pages are the ideas of inducing birth, C-sections, obstetricians and what the doctors should do about birth. The most interesting part out of all of these was the part about the obstetricians because it was one of the first times in the book where he used his personal experience. He recalls times where he was encountered by obstetricians personally and the way he dealt with them professionally. Because he can’t give birth, he isn’t as personally familiar with inducing birth and C-sections as he is with working with obstetricians so I feel like it was the more interesting to read.

I think that something that should be talked about more are induction, the idea of a midwife, when to use C-section, a better way that babies can be born and alternatives to what we have in our society now and the role of doctors in the pregnancy. Whether or not they are always needed and what is the exact role when they are needed.

The author usually uses a lot of statistics and being in the medical field himself he has different perspectives that a normal author would have. The evidence that he has is pretty convincing because he himself is in medicine and a lot of things that he talks about he has experiences with and can analyze the way he does things and the way he sees things being done and how he would have them differently. There are many charts throughout the book that have statistics and interesting numbers on different categories. GGGGG