The Myth of Normal 124

women’s bodies are intrinsically bound to fail. It really is obvious that the culture wants to impress upon women this view of their bodies as inherently defective and needing high-level technological care.” And that will carry on, she added, “into how she brings up the child to be in accord with the demands of the culture.” Though systemic sexism tilts the playing field against women in particular, there is also a broader cause of unnecessary medical interference, one foundational to the Western medical view: a distrust of natural processes and fear of what can, may, or will go wrong.[*] Michael Klein, former head of the family practice department at BC Women's Hospital in Vancouver, has done extensive research on medical birthing. “You learn in a very biased environment that sees childbirth as scary and dangerous,” he told me. The paradigm that dominates medical training “sees birth as nothing more than an accident waiting to happen, an opportunity for your pelvic floor to be bent out of shape. The women are unexploded bombs that need defusing.” Throughout my medical schooling and internship, I was trained to anticipate the problems, complications, and dangers of birth. All good, as far as it went. The problem was, nothing in my training encouraged me to align with Nature. It was left to my patients and my midwife colleagues to teach birth to me as something more than a mechanical procedure of extracting a baby from the mother’s body—something with ingrained, evolutionarily derived purposes, both physiological and emotional. Sherri Dolman, a California woman I’ve come to know, had to wage an intense and protracted struggle for autonomy around her pregnancies. Despite a triumphant ending, her tale is a medical horror story. “I tried to conceive that child for three years,” she told me. “But when I became pregnant, I was no longer able to make decisions for my child or for myself. I will never shake that for the rest of my life.” Dolman was coerced into a cesarean section she did not want and, as she subsequently proved, never needed. “My doctor did not respect my decisions,” she said, “and I don’t think he respected me as an autonomous human being. I believe he thought he knew better than me. I can’t think of one single instance where a man is told what he can and can’t do with his body, but women are told this every day