 There is no clear scientific method for assessing the overall benefits or detriments of normalizing highly technologically mediated, medicalized birth. Most of the standard interventions during labor have never been tested in any systematic fashion, but are rather part of a folk culture of medicine. The rhetorical valuation of either ‘natural’ or medically managed birth as safer, more responsible, more maternal, etc. can function to enforce a set of social norms that are for the most part cut free from scientific evidence about the medical soundness of various birth decisions and paths (Kukla 2008, Lyerly 2006).