Our society's perceptions of birth are so skewed by fear that fewer and fewer women question the wisdom of medical interventions. Oddly, the impetus to reduce interventions and demedicalize birth is coming from those who pay for births, the insurance providers. Women who choose to birth without any intervention seek out independent midwives and birth at home. Women who want a medicalized birth have the pick of any hospital in their communities. Those who choose to birth in a hospital while maintaining birth as a normal, natural life experience, thinking of the hospital's medical facilities only as back-up, are lost in the middle.
Hospitals are emergency facilities, designed to intervene.
They are not designed to witness life processes, whether they be births, deaths or anything in between. It may be absurd to expect people taught to act, to simply witness. Labor support provided by women who provide continuous physical and emotional support to the mother has been proven to effect drastic changes in the outcome of hospital births. Study after study reveals that most women need little more than a loving witness to the right of passage which is birth, yet such support is available to few. Most women need no intervention beyond the support of someone who trusts in birth and the creative power of women.