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family practice here. She met me, and she looked me in the eyes, and she was fully present. I just felt safe with everyone in there.” In those words we hear the second factor determining the quality of women’s experience: safety and support. A health care system that honors women’s strengths and their vulnerabilities gives them the best chance at a childbirth experience they can cherish. This view runs through a little gem of a pregnancy primer, A Is for Advice (The Reassuring Kind), by the Brooklyn-born, B.C.-based midwife Ilana Stanger-Ross. “The women who report the most positive birth experiences,” she observes, “are those who feel they understood all the decisions made and had a say in the decision-making process. That holds even for complicated births among women who had been hoping for ‘natural’ deliveries—births that require multiple interventions, births that end in surgery.”[9] To learn about the physiology of childbearing is to marvel at the innate wisdom of Nature and its highest evolutionary achievement, the human body. The biological bottom line is this: Mammalian labor is more than a process of expelling an infant from a womb. It is preparation for life. Labor, as Nature designed it, promotes the release of hormones such as estrogen, oxytocin, and prolactin that activate a host of neural systems governing the emotions and behaviors, ensuring the baby’s well-being in the short and long terms: warmth, nurturing, bonding, protection, and so on. In other words, birth prepares the template for the mother-infant relationship, which itself is the central locus of the child’s early development.[10] Having been out of the baby-catching game for some decades, I was caught off guard by a phrase Stanger-Ross used when we spoke: “obstetrical trauma.” “That has become a term,” she said. “Unfortunately, a lot of women feel that their birthing experience was one of trauma, which, of course, is going to have impacts on the parent-child relationship. If the birth was traumatizing, then how does that translate when now you have a newborn in your arms?” Right on cue, I was given a textbook illustration of this alarming trend via a conversation I had the day I finished this chapter. I was being interviewed