Why does the reality of everyday, routine care for birthing women diverge so radically from best-evidence practice? It’s probably the money. The routine use of continuous fetal monitoring is a fine example, because continuous monitoring for every woman all the time is not best-evidence care, but once a hospital owns a fetal monitor for every L&D room, it becomes “hospital policy” to do just that: monitor every woman, all the time. The monitors are little cash-producing machines that crank out nice profits along with those paper strips. The CDC just released the latest data on the c-...