The AMA and medical-industrial complex support a ban on home births. How can people believe they are free when something as intimate as childbirth is so heavily controlled by the corporate state? Of course, we need freedom for families to make their choice among hospitals and home birth options. For a case for home birth, and against the establishment that embraces a program of processing women in labor as fast as it can through the systematic reliance on the pitocin-epidural-cesarean process, see the great documentary, The Business of Being Born.

The artificial process of bringing on contractions, then giving pain relief, then bringing on more contractions, then resorting to cesareans when things don’t go as smoothly and quickly as desired, reminds me of the spiral of interventionism Mises described. I wouldn’t want to push the metaphor too far but it has led to an incredible increase in cesarean births. In much of the world, midwife births are the norm. In America, they have been marginalized and now risk being prohibited.