Just had a baby at a hospital (wish we had had nearby birthing centers).<p>Ideally, the wife is in a focused state of mind with as little anxiety as possible (and as much rest as possible).<p>We had previous births before at this hospital, but with midwives who were banned during Covid (they aren’t as profitable) - so not this time. Without the midwives there to block unnecessary questions, we were bombarded with so many questions and suggestions for interventions we weren’t interested in. Very distracting (everyone should count how many questions someone about to be in labor has to answer - even those with detailed birthing plan documents).<p>The strangest was my wife being woken at 3AM by someone asking for two more blood draws because they wanted to be extra certain they know her blood type. With our history at the hospital (multiple births, growing up in the town), this was probably going to be her 10th draw in history to answer that question.<p>Wide politely declines and the technician is shocked.<p>That’s when I realized that there is probably some actuary in Chicago or somewhere whose excel sheet says the risk of the wrong transfusion goes down by 0.02% if you draw blood before labor. Unfortunately the excel sheet doesn’t optimize for anything else.<p>My takeaway was that we need to change from saying “this reduces risk” to something with analogies. Risk reduction along one axis at the expense of all others seems to be a critical failure of the current western system.<p>“Drawing blood now is like wearing a life vest while you are driving a car next to a river” (or is it like BASE jumping without an instructor?)