HW 40 - Insights from Book - Part 3

This past weekend, I found myself at a cocktail party with Marsden Wagner, the author of the book I just finished reading. To demonstrate that I really read it, I said, "Hey - thanks for writing Born in the USA. Your idea that obstetricians in the US tend to be uninformed about how to treat regular, low-risk births, and instead treat pregnancy and birth as illnesses that need to be cured made me rethink the way I view medical care in the US.

But Dr. Wagner, surprised to be talking to someone who instead of sharing their own birth story actually rephrased the main idea of the text he spent months giving birth to, asked me, "Really, which parts were most effective or important for you?" So I told him: "Well, in the last third of the book you focused on what should change about how birth is treated, and how those changes could be implemented, which restated and added onto the ideas presented to the first 2/3rds of the book. But let me be more specific." And then I listed the top 3 ideas from that final third of the book (I somehow even managed to list page number references, probably because I have a photographic memory when it comes to reading and remembering details from books about how pregnancy and birth are viewed in the US).

1. Humanizing birth (treating it as a natural process) by educating the public, doctors, and other maternity care providers (midwives and obstetricians) (220).

2. Preserving the patient's right to sue a doctor, in order to make doctors more accountable for their actions (224).

3. Using science to improve maternity care - but using scientific data that is accurate in order to help women give birth, as opposed to using it to defend harmful choices made by doctors (246).

At this point, realizing that he was having a unique conversation with a serious reader of his book, Mr. Wagner asked - "But what could I have done to make this a better book - that would more effectively fulfill its mission?" I answered, "Well, let's be clear - your book sought to provide narratives, historical analysis, and policy analysis from the perspective of a practitioner and public health specialist (you), in order for the book-reading-public to better understand pregnancy & birth in our culture. Given that aim, and your book, the best advice I would give for a 2nd edition of the text would be to be a bit more concise - things don't need to be restated that much -  and explore more different aspects of birth, with the same detail that you used in Born in the USA.

But I don't want you to feel like I'm criticizing- I mean, I haven't even written a book (yet). I appreciate the immense amount of labor you dedicated to this important issue and particularly for making me think about how doctors become isolated from society after all those years in medical school, and how this changes the way they view their work and their patients - the hospital becomes a small world, centered around making people feel better, even when they aren't sick in the first place. In fact, I'm likely to view medical care and doctors in general differently as a result of your book - I'll probably be more skeptical about things I am told about medical care, and less likely to do what a doctor suggests without questioning it first."

Dr. Wagner replied, "Thank you! Talking to you has made me realize that teenagers today aren't as apathetic as the media makes them out to be, which gives me hope about our future as a society!"