ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a unique obstetric perspective on the coal mine and the canary. Alison Barrett, an obstetrician from New Zealand, discusses the iatrogenesis in the coal mine of mainstream maternity care and uses an analogy to humankind’s response to climate change to parallel the blindness to the harms we are creating in childbirth. Andrew Kotaska, an obstetrician from Canada, talks about risk and how we can communicate risk to women as doctors and midwives. He argues that telling women that it is ‘my way or the highway’ can lead to them taking the highway.
