Through their comparative and multi-leveled analyses, the editors and contributors remind readers that while birth is a natural physiological phenomenon, our understandings of birth, the birthing process, and how and from whom mothers should receive maternity care are culturally based and are continually constructed and reconstructed. By re-focusing our attention on birth outcomes as women's experiences and the reproduction of societies and culture, the editors and contributors of Birth by Design do problematize all contexts of maternity care, and by doing so, challenge birthing mothers, caregivers, and policy makers in our thinking about the birthing process. -- Canadian Journal of Sociology Online (CJS Online), March - April 2002