She’s flat on her back, on a gurney racing down the hospital hallway while screaming for an epidural. Or, she’s lying in a hospital bed with an IV drip of fluids and Pitocin while waiting for labor to start. That’s how women giving birth are often shown on TV. That’s not the reality of normal birth—but it is how it happens in far too many U.S. hospitals. Interventions such as induction, anesthesia, medications, IV fluids, electronic fetal monitoring, and cesarean birth have become a normal part of the landscape of labor for many women, even as research begins to show that they may be detriment
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