Catching Babies, Paperback

The birthing of a new baby is one of life's great medical and human dramas. When it goes well, it is a loud and joyful mess. But when it goes badly, it is a travesty, devastating not only to hopeful mothers, but also to their doctors regardless of how well they have learned to anticipate and navigate the myriad hazards of obstetric medicine.

Catching Babies charts the professional and personal struggles of those doctors. In the halls of a busy metropolitan teaching hospital, a group of OB/GYN doctors complete their residencies and embark on ambitious careers, all while trying to hold their lives together at the seams. Jay is running from a life he's tried to leave behind, while Katie sacrifices everything she has to serve an endless parade of needy patients. Anna is out trying to save the world, while Tracy is trying to save twins dying in utero. Based on true stories from delivery rooms and labor decks, Catching Babies spins the doctors' stories into a gripping mosaic of the obsessions, the anxieties, and the heroism of doctors who have chosen to preside over life's greatest medical drama-high-risk childbirth.

AUTHOR'S NOTE (abridged):

"I started researching and writing Catching Babies in 2003 as a non-fiction expos of the messy and often fierce technical, moral, and cultural conflicts at the heart of women's health. My earlier study of the clinical practice patterns of childbirth and gynecologic surgery, combined with fortuitous friendships with physicians and midwives at critical moments in their training, coalesced in a stark idea I had yet to encounter in the health services literature: obstetrics and gynecology stand at ground zero of a broader health care system pulled apart by polarizing forces that often have little to do with medicine, ethics, or patients' real needs.

Catching Babies was originally intended as a clinically detailed study of how these wildly problematic and deeply misunderstood medical subjects play out in the real world. It was conceived as the general public's first hard look behind the medical curtain into the practice, politics, and often bizarre culture of obstetrics and gynecology, as smashed together into a single specialty and "organized" in the most disorganized health care system in the world. It would also map out the complex turf war between most (but not all) OB/GYNs and the growing and diverse ranks of midwives.

As I dug more deeply into these cases and their often unlikely outcomes, I noticed the recurrence of an odd phenomenon that has confounded health researchers for decades: medical decisions and outcomes often have less to do with what the patient needs or where public health analysis would lead, and more to do with what's eating at the doctor, what's making the patient act out, or what's wrong back at either one's home.

Fast-forward through a few rough drafts and a few rough years, and suddenly the medical cases I had assembled to illustrate some of health care's thornier problems struck me as far more interesting than the problems themselves. Catching Babies still seeks to tell the larger story of how and why we deliver most babies and care for most women in the odd and often maddening ways we do.

There is nothing that simultaneously combines so much wonder, terror, and joy than childbirth. People who witness it for the first time so often refer to it in starkly religious terms, because it really is the miracle of life, unfolding before our very eyes, every single time."

J.D. Kleinke