Bibliography Obstetricians treat women laboring slowly the way Peter Pan treated the Lost Boys. He expected everyone to adapt to his ideas of the way things should be. If they didn't, Peter saw to it that they did. For example, the boys entered the Neverland underground home through hollow trees. So too with obstetric management.
Obstetricians have inflexible ideas of how labor ought to go.
There are, as you may gather, a number of drawbacks to this myopic approach. The first is that the standard for labor progress doesn't give you nearly enough time before you are declared over the line. A recent study evaluating healthy women who had no interventions that would affect labor length got very different results. For example, the standard says that starting from 4 centimeters cervical dilation, the average first-time mother will take 6 hours to achieve full dilation of 10 centimeters. The standard also stipulates smooth, linear progress.