The circumstances that cause doctors to interfere more and more frequently with confinements that promise to be normal are the following: In the well-to-do classes, _the extreme busyness of the doctor_, on the one hand, _which makes him disinclined to wait for Nature to do her work_; and, on the other, his interested relationship to his patient, which makes it almost necessary for him to appear as her champion. By encouraging the patient to be put to sleep and to allow the process to be hurried, the doctor thus kills two birds with one stone. After only a few hours’ labour, therefore, he will employ anæsthetics, and the result is that what might have been a fairly normal confinement, free from anæsthesia and instruments, becomes a serious operation, in which damage is frequently inflicted on the young mother. In the poorer classes the same thing happens, except that poor women often go to some public institution to be confined. It should not be forgotten, however, that young and aspiring doctors have to acquire some practice with the obstetric forceps, and that it is precisely in homes and hospitals that this practice can be obtained. Instead of its being the excessive busyness of the doctor that leads to the hasty and unnecessary use of instruments, therefore, it is now the circumstance that the woman may find herself in a maternity-home or hospital. And the tragic part of it is that the demonstrating surgeon in such cases, far from electing an abnormal pregnancy for his exhibition, deliberately chooses the most normal of his patients, because of the greater ease with which the demonstration can then be made. Thus, even when Nature is most willing and modern women are most normal, natural functioning is spurned and rebuffed. Such cases, however, are possible only in an atmosphere that has long been infected with body-despising prejudices. In no other atmosphere would the doctors dare to behave in this way. At all events, among both the rich and the poor, normal confinements are becoming increasingly rare, and we shall now try to discover why, except in case of obvious abnormality, this is so; and why, moreover, even in normal confinements there is always, or almost always, the alleged “sorrow” or excessive pain of biblical tradition. Provisionally we suggest the following reasons for the difficulties of parturition among modern women, and for the fact that nothing is done to restore more normal functioning: