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Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife by Peggy Vincent is a book that's straight to the point in describing it's contents and structure. Every few pages jumps between the stories of a new birth significant to the forthcoming of Ms. Vincent changing from a nurse to the midwife. Not every story is directly related to birth, some 'chapters' are dedicated to classes and other people or experiences that separate her from the rest of her peers such as Kennedy's death and Ms. Vincent's disconnect from it and the national depression that followed it. As the reader, we follow her as a nursing student and her beginning to question why the birthing system is set up the way it is. How did it become inhumane enough that a mother wasn't allowed to hold her own child? What made the doctor the God of the delivery room and the woman's body instead of the woman herself?

major insight goes here

Through reading this book, while there were some of these things I also learned from my birthing stories, there were a few (some horrifying, other shocking) things that came up in the book. It's easiest to list them as bullet points:

• During about the fifties and sixties, there was a drug (which Vee from my interviews called Twilight) that made the mothers forget most of the process and supposedly remove the pain.
• At the time of Ms. Vincent's nurses, mothers who didn't follow the norm of what the doctors wanted and expected, they were mocked and considered crazy by the doctors
• While now, as I discovered with my little brother's birth, people can just walk in and out of the delivery room. However, during the time at the start of the book, this wasn't typical or allowed.