Maureen May, CNM, PhD,  began her career with an Associates Degree of Nursing from San Jacinto Community College.  In her nursing rotation the observed births at Jefferson Davis Hospital and saw midwife attended births at the hospital birthing center at JD.  Later she received her Bachelor of Nursing from Syracuse university and worked as a Womans Health Nurse-Practitioner in Syracuse.  in the mid-1990’s she began her learning program with Frontier School of Nurse-Midwifery.  She later did a fellowship at a freestanding birth center in the Rio Grande Valley where she was again exposed to normal, non-interventive birth.  When she finished her doctoral course work in Social Science with a concentration in Anthropology and ethnographic methods, she found a hospital based midwifery service who agreed to let her observe their clinical activities.  She was unprepared for the changes that had occurred in hospital birth since her early training.  Her observations as to the dramatic changes in how labor and delivery and childbirth practices are now organized led to her dissertation and this new book, Epiduralized Birth and Nurse-Midwifery.  Childbirth in the United States.  A Medical Ethnography.