The Myth of Normal 121

being poked and prodded under bright lights and having plastic suction tubes shoved in its mouth. Nor does the cord have to be cut immediately: it can be allowed to complete its pulsations, delivering more oxygen-carrying red blood cells to the infant.[1] It’s almost as if Nature knows what it’s doing. These once-heretical practices have since been validated by solid medical research. At long last, doctors now have—more accurately, ought to have— permission to support in good conscience what human beings, with or without any “professionals” assisting, have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. As the American journalist Anne Fadiman describes in her illuminating work on the clash of medical cultures besetting Hmong immigrants to the United States, these Asian women stubbornly resisted some of our “best practices” in favor of their own ways, including “squatting during delivery and refusing permission for episiotomy incisions to enlarge the vaginal opening . . . Many Hmong women were used to being held from behind by their husbands, who massaged their bellies with saliva and hummed loudly just before the baby emerged.”[2] In short, they had tradition, intuition, innate body sense, Nature, and—no doubt unbeknownst to them— the most up-to-date science on their side.[3] Not to mention their husbands, who literally had their backs. The advent of modern obstetrics has brought much to be grateful for, sparing many women and infants from avoidable suffering, illness, and death. The problem is that, along with its triumphs, and in line with the mechanistic approach of Western medicine in general, obstetrical practice ignores the genuine and natural needs of mothers and babies—in fact, it often runs roughshod over them. Bringing infants into the world is not simply a question of pushing and pulling and cutting and catching. It is a major threshold in human development, and how it is crossed has potentially lifelong consequences. By pathologizing the birth process, present-day medical practice contradicts the wisdom of Nature and of the human body. More damningly, it frequently violates even its own commitments to align itself with science and to, first, “do no harm.” We need not abandon the great achievements of medical work to honor traditional wisdom, rooted in age-old experience. We can embrace both.