Over the past half century, we have learned a great deal about the problems that we encounter in pregnancy and childbirth. Many, many lives have been saved--women's lives and babies' lives. We've even learned how to grow babies in test tubes and inject them into the mother's uterus and have her bring them to term and be able to give birth. We've done miraculous things but the fact is we have studied natural birth very, very little. All of the research that we have done over the past half-century has been done with women in the unnatural environment of the hospital. This is like studying elephants and zebras and monkeys in the zoo. We know that animals do not reproduce well when they are in the zoo, when they are taken from their natural habitat. We need to devote the next half-century to studying normal birth in a more natural environment. What happens in the birth of the human being when we leave the mother and the father and the baby and the family to their own devices? We have much more to learn. And we need to learn that before we interfere with normal birth.