HW 39 - Insights from Book - Part 2

 Wagner, Marsden. Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First. Univ of California Pr, 2008. Print. 

While comparing The Business of Being Born and Born in the USA, I've found that the main difference between the two is the audience for which each medium is aimed. The Business of Being Born focuses heavily on the emotional aspect of pregnancy/birth whereas Born in the USA incorporates the emotional and business sides of the maternity system. The chapters I've most recently read were about midwives and legalities. This part of the book relates heavily to The Business of Being Born (TBBB) because they both fixate on midwives. The difference is that Born in the USA (BUSA) examines and gives examples of legal cases in which "the good guys" have been direct targets of the maternity care system. I personally enjoy watching TBBB more than reading BUSA because it's much more engaging. BUSA does have some really good information and touching stories to share, but I feel that the setup which they are given creates a strong unintrest for the reader. Example, on page 143 of the book, the reader is given a boatload of percentages and numbers and basically have to create an image in their head of how the data would be set up. I personally had to read over it 5 times to get the general idea of how the numbers would look next to one another, but I can hardly imagine that every single reader re-reads things they understand. In fact, normally I'd probably skim it and tell myself that the context would help me understand it. But the context didn't. And anything that came afterwords didn't really help to explain what the data meant. (Would put in quote but it takes up a full 1/2 page).

The second part of BUSA forces the idea that midwives are generally (not always, there was some counter-evidence) better birth-helpers due to emotional as well as health factors. I feel as though giving birth with a midwife would in fact be the best experience for giving birth. It seems much more emotional and not as sterile as hospital birth. Through my reading I've created a sort of mindset that doctors don't care about the patient, they simply care about the money, and how to make it fast.