The Business of Being Born

It's like my economics professor always said, if twenty dollars is left laying on the ground, you are likely to never see it because someone else will almost always pick it up before you get there, and if you have an idea, odds are that someone else has already thought of it and is already doing something about it.

Like most prof's, he was right. A few months ago my wife started collecting information for a book about unnecessary medical intrusion in childbirth. Just two days ago I started this blog, and tonight on Larry King Live, Ricki Lake introduced her new movie, The Business of Being Born.

One of the things that Ricki discussed with Larry King was the extensive employment of C-Sections in the medical field, not out of medical necessity, but as a legal shield against potential complications in natural childbirth. The reasoning goes that doctors have more control when they do C-Sections, and are therefore likely to encounter less complications that might lead to injury, which might lead to lawsuits. So, to avoid liability for personal injury in childbirth, doctors across the US are cutting women open at a disgusting rate 31.1% of all births in 2006!

I'm not normally a litigious person, but perhaps what we need is a spate of lawsuits against doctors for pressuring mothers into unnecessary C-Sections...