How odd that a doctor would tell someone that a forty year old's muscles 'don't know how to push'?! Perhaps that could almost, almost hold if, say, you were eighty-five years old and pregnant (!), and your body was slowly failing on you, but really...does that mean that leg muscles don't know how to work at forty? Arm muscles? Tongue muscles? How absurd!

Wouldn't it be nice if there was some encouragement to believe in the body's ability to birth, rather than the assumption that a woman over a certain age will automatically fail at this? It's nice to hear stories of medical professionals encouraging 'older' women to birth vaginally, rather than just deciding for them that they have to birth via caesarean section based on a number. I completely understand the need for intervention in the event that mother or baby is in danger (I was a c-section baby born two months early due to my mother's placenta abrupting), but that just seems strange.