I got a call this morning from a woman in her third trimester, driving down from the valley because her Oslo doctor told her that birthing without an epidural was basically signing up for trauma. She'd never asked for one. She was scared now. I spent an hour undoing that, and then I thought about how many conversations like this I'm having instead of conversations about whether her birth partner can be present, or whether we have time for her to move around in labour, or what actually matters to her. The fear-selling has gotten so loud that women don't even know what they want anymore — they just know they're supposed to be terrified. That's not medicine. That's marketing dressed up as protection.
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