The Myth of Normal 128

over video conference by a New York journalist reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic, which at the time was engulfing her city. At one point, Courtney, as I’ll call her, proudly showed off her three-month-old cherub. When she learned what I was working on, she poured out the awful story of her recent experience at Mount Sinai Hospital at the hands of one of New York’s most prominent and well-regarded obstetricians. It is as clear a tale of normalized obstetrical trauma as can be imagined. Thirty-seven years old and healthy, Courtney was expecting an uneventful delivery. At thirty weeks the physician phoned her to announce, as if by decree, that, given her age, labor would be induced at thirty-nine weeks. This, the doctor said, was “the office protocol here” for anyone older than thirtyfive. “She had known my age from the beginning, since I walked into her office last May,” Courtney said. “I was so shocked that I hung up the phone —I barely said a word. I had to have half a glass of wine. I was so upset, I didn’t sleep all that night.” It went downhill from there. Courtney recalled with pain “the sudden disappearance of flexibility and the imposition of a tyrannical dictate. It was not the kind of care I expected. I’m not used to being bullied by doctors or talked down to. The tone became so toxic . . . and then she also kept saying, ‘The baby is huuuge. He’s going to be huuuge.’ I said to her, ‘Wait, I heard that growth scans are notoriously bad at predicting weight.’ She responded, ‘Not at Sinai. He’s going to be nine pounds at least.’” (The baby’s actual birth weight: less than eight pounds.) Courtney considered looking for a new physician, but this late in pregnancy and still in awe of the specialist’s credentials, she stayed put. “By week thirty-eight, she was saying, every week, ‘This is really not looking good for vaginal, it’s really not. I don’t know what to tell you.’ I just kept saying, ‘I really don’t want a C-section.’ And this was our dynamic week after week. I was in a terrible state of mind for the last three or four weeks of the pregnancy: sobbing, nervous breakdown . . . At the appointed time, we show up at Mount Sinai, and it’s a horrible scene. We’re in this waiting room for three hours, a million different things going on, and I kept saying to my partner, ‘Why the fuck am I here? We are totally within our rights to go back to Brooklyn and go into labor naturally.’” Feeling disempowered, having her