The Book Blawg

GELLERMAN: For most of his career Dr. Marsden Wagner was your typical American OB/GYN. A baby doctor; delivering his share of the four million babies that are born each year in the United States.

Ninety-nine percent of those births take place in hospitals. That's the way it should be, thought Dr. Wagner until he became the Director of Women and Children's Health at the World Health Organization and began to travel to places where midwives do the job.

What he saw changed his life.

WAGNER: And it was an epiphany for me it was a shock beyond belief because that woman when she got near birth she started yelling and she said to the midwife and to me and the family and everybody, "Stand back, I'm gonna have this baby!" And she did. And what I actually witnessed for the first time in my life was a woman in her full power, and it scared me to death.