For thousands of years women have given birth among people they know in a place they know well. Knowledge is shared and birth is a social event. In northern industrial societies today, when a women gets pregnant she may be presented with various options. Yet if it is her first baby she has only the vaguest idea of how birth feels and how other women cope. Birth is set apart from the rest of women's lives and accepted as a matter of specialist knowledge. To discuss birth only in terms of our Western culture is to get a one-dimensional view of it. This book offer a cross cultural perspective.