A Memoir & Critique
An Insider's Perspective on Risk, Incentives,
and Reclaiming Birth
"Trusting a system and understanding it are two entirely different things."
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An Insider's Perspective
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About the Book
After seventeen years building a career inside the American healthcare system, the author believed she understood it. She helped thousands of people navigate insurance, benefits, and access to care. She trusted doctors. She trusted the system.
Then she had her first child — and everything she thought she knew was quietly dismantled over thirty-six hours in a hospital room.
A Tale of Two Births is the story of what happened next: the questions she could not stop asking, the research she could not stop doing, and the second birth — in a birth center, with a midwife, on her own terms — that changed everything.
This is not a book against medicine. It is a book about what happens when fear becomes a business model, when incentive structures shape care decisions, and when women are not given the information they need to make real choices about their own bodies.
"What I wanted — above all else — was the safest possible outcome for my baby. And I believed safety came from compliance."
What This Book Explores
01
The American maternity care system is not designed around what is best for you. It is designed around what is most efficient, most defensible, and most profitable for the institution. Fear is the mechanism that makes it all run.
02
More than 70% of laboring women in the U.S. receive epidural fentanyl — a drug that crosses the placenta and is detectable in newborns. Most are never told the word 'fentanyl.' That is not informed consent. That is assumption wearing consent's clothing.
03
Interventions often create the very problems they are used to justify. The logic becomes circular. The momentum, however, does not. Understanding how this cascade works is the first step to interrupting it.
04
Birth, when it is undisturbed, is a spiritual experience. The body knows what to do when it is allowed to know it. This book is about finding your way back to that knowledge — and the courage it takes to trust it.
Inside the Book
Chapter One
The story begins not in labor, but in the comfortable assumption that experts were in charge of the most important event of my life — and that this was exactly how it should be.
Chapter Two
In 1900, nearly every baby born in America was born at home. By 1960, ninety-six percent were born in hospitals. This shift was not driven by data. It was driven by power, economics, and the deliberate reframing of a natural process as a medical emergency waiting to happen.
Chapter Three
The epidural. The Pitocin. The cervical sweeps. The alarms. The shift changes. Each intervention came with reassurance. Each consequence came as a surprise.
Chapter Four
Coming home already depleted — not in the poetic way people talk about postpartum exhaustion, but in a cellular, structural way. The system, having discharged me, had quietly stepped away.
Chapter Seven
In a birth center, you have to keep earning your eligibility. Each appointment a gate. Each result a potential branch point toward more testing, more monitoring, more intervention. I attended them with clarity rather than comfort.
Chapter Nine
He was placed on my chest and he stayed there — not briefly, not as a checkbox before the real work of assessment began, but because he was mine and I was his and nothing in that room was more important than that fact.
Chapter Ten
You are not a bystander. You have been told, implicitly and explicitly, by nearly every cultural message about birth that your role is to wait. To drive. To hold her hand if she wants it and stay out of the way if she doesn't. That is not a role. That is an absence wearing the shape of a role.
Chapter Eleven
You are allowed to ask questions. You are allowed to decline. You are allowed to take time. You are allowed to want more information before you consent to something that will happen to your body or your baby's body. That is not difficult. That is your right.
"Birth, when it is undisturbed, is a spiritual experience. The body knows what to do when it is allowed to know it. A knowledge that arrives not through the mind but through every cell, every breath, every moment of labor that moved through me and left me on the other side of it changed."
The Second Birth
Within two hours of Brody's birth, they were home. In their own bed. Their son between them. No alarms. No shift changes. No strangers. Just the dark, and the warmth, and the feeling of something enormous completing itself.
Brittany George
Author
About the Author
Brittany George spent seventeen years building a career inside the American healthcare system. She runs a health insurance agency and has spent nearly two decades helping employees, families, and business owners navigate a system so complex it might as well have been designed to be misunderstood.
She is not a midwife. She is not a doctor. She is not an activist. She is a woman who trusted the system completely — and who learned, through her own body, where that trust was misplaced.
Her first birth — thirty-six hours in a hospital, a rotating cast of strangers, a cascade of interventions she had not been prepared for — left her with a healthy daughter and a question she could not stop asking: What just happened to me?
Her second birth — in a birth center, with a midwife she had chosen, in a room that felt like safety rather than surveillance — was the best day of her life. This book is the distance between those two experiences, and everything she learned in the years between them.
Career
17 years in health insurance — helping thousands navigate the American healthcare system
Perspective
An insider who understands how hospitals are contracted, reimbursed, and how incentive structures shape care decisions
First Birth
36 hours in a hospital — and a healthy daughter she almost missed being present for
Second Birth
A birth center, a midwife named Candace, HypnoBirthing, and the best day of her life
Praise
This book does something rare: it makes you angry and hopeful at the same time. Every woman planning a birth should read it. Every husband should read it. Every OB should read it.
— Reader Review
I had my first child in a hospital and my second at home. I wish I had read this before either birth. The chapter on informed consent alone is worth the entire book.
— Reader Review
She writes with the precision of someone who has spent two decades in healthcare and the vulnerability of someone who has been failed by it. The combination is devastating and necessary.
— Reader Review
Pre-Order Notification
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An Insider's Perspective on Risk,
Incentives, and Reclaiming Birth
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