The Business of Baby

**What Doctors, Corporations, and Hospitals Won't Tell You About Pregnancy, Birth, and Infant Care**

By Jennifer Margulis

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn**

Why the United States spends more on maternal and infant care than any other nation yet produces worse outcomes. How profit motives shape nearly every decision made about your pregnancy, your birth, and your baby. What the evidence actually says about common interventions, and how to make informed choices that prioritize health over corporate interests.

**Who This Book Is For**

Expectant parents who want to understand the system they are entering. New parents questioning the advice they receive. Healthcare professionals who suspect the standard model of care has lost its way. Anyone who wonders why a country so wealthy produces such poor results for mothers and infants.

Something is deeply wrong with how America treats mothers and babies. The United States spends more money on healthcare than any other country in the world. Hospital charges related to pregnancy, delivery, and infant care rank among the top five most expensive conditions requiring hospitalization. Yet for all this spending, American mothers die at rates higher than those in forty-eight other countries. American babies are less likely to reach their first birthday than babies born in Cuba, Poland, or Malaysia. This is not a paradox. It is a predictable outcome of a system designed to generate profit rather than protect health. Jennifer Margulis spent years investigating the business forces that shape pregnancy, birth, and infant care in America. What she found was a web of financial incentives, corporate influence, and institutional practices that systematically undermine the health of mothers and babies. The system does not fail despite its structure. It fails because of it. Most books about pregnancy and parenting focus on what individual mothers should do. They offer advice about nutrition, exercise, and nursery preparation. They rarely ask why the standard advice exists, who benefits from it, and whether the evidence supports it. This book asks those questions. It examines why C-section rates have climbed from five percent in the 1960s to nearly thirty-three percent today, far exceeding the World Health Organization's recommendation of ten to fifteen percent. It investigates why breastfeeding rates remain low despite overwhelming evidence of its benefits. It explores why routine procedures like immediate cord clamping, continuous fetal monitoring, and infant circumcision persist despite weak or absent evidence supporting them. The answer, Margulis discovered, is rarely medical necessity. It is business. Hospitals make more money from surgical births than vaginal ones. Formula companies profit when breastfeeding fails. Pharmaceutical companies benefit when pregnancy is treated as a condition requiring medication. Device manufacturers thrive when birth is monitored with expensive equipment. Each intervention creates a…