 As discussed above, birth has been heavily medicalized in contemporary North America, while at the same time a vocal ‘natural birth’ movement has pushed against medicalization. The disagreement between these two camps often circulates around whether birth is best thought of as a dangerous and abnormal process best managed by medical experts in an institutional setting, or as a ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ bodily function that requires formal medical intervention only in unusual cases. Proponents of ‘natural’ childbirth point out that current norms of hospital birth often result in a cascade of interventions (with the majority of births involving labor inducing drugs and fetal monitoring, for instance, both of which in turn raise the chance that the labor will end with a cesarean section). In contrast, proponents of the medical model of birth argue that while serious complications during labor are reasonably rare, they can occur quickly and their effects can be catastrophic, and it is simply good risk reasoning to have the expertise and resources of high-tech medicine available during labor.