This book is an attempt to bring together experts in their respective fields to place in one volume, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of normal birth practice. A glance through the Contents pages will reveal the variety of perspectives included here. Soo and I wanted to capture, as far as we could, a holistic overview of the current state of knowledge and skills in the wonderful complexity of labour and birthing. At the risk of overstating the significance of this particular era of childbirth practice, we both feel a sense of crisis confronting advocates of physiological birth. All over the planet, there appears to be an exorable drift towards a technocratic model of birthing (Davis-Floyd 1992) and a marginalisation of the low-tech, non-hospital birth.rn