In an excellent but out-of-print book, Stepping Stones to Labor Ward Diagnosis, I read how to determine the obstetric type without doing an internal exam. The author was a practicing obstetrician/gynecologist in Australia in the 1950s and into the 1970s. During that time a link was found between bone cancer in pre-adolescent males and routine x-ray for fetal position, size and pelvic compatibility during the ninth month gestation. (Does this sound familiar for ultrasound exam today?) Further studies on x-ray exposure during pregnancy showed other links to fetal anomalies and led to warnings against such exposure.

After seven years of being a doula, midwife and childbirth educator in a huge urban Indian city, I have started to see a difference. Times are changing. Women and their partners are standing for what they believe in.

Just as we are learning about human nature from new perspectives, we are also at a turning point in our understanding of human births. Until now, the focus has been on mechanical difficulties. Countless textbooks have reproduced drawings showing the size and the shape of the fetal skull in relation to the maternal pelvis as a way to explain why the birth process cannot be easy in our species. If the main reasons for difficulties were mechanical, how to explain that, occasionally, women who are not special, from a morphological perspective, have their first baby easily within a few minutes, while others need a caesarean section after one or two days of tough labour?