Today, Mychael Darthard-Dawodu became the most recent newborn kidnapped from a hospital by someone posing as a nurse.

My wife is a certified doula and childbirth educator (though she isn't taking any clients at present, due to my school schedule). When we lived in Phoenix, she volunteered her time and knowledge to pregnant teens at Florence Crittenton. She is an expert on childbirth and a strong advocate for women's choice in childbirth. If you ask, she will gladly explain in great detail the risks posed by an epidural, the alarming national rate of birth by cesarean, the problems with pitocin, and a host of other medical issues that strongly recommend natural childbirth... and having your baby somewhere that is not a hospital.

Many of these issues (which I will not elaborate upon here) tie into what I would like to suggest is a growing problem with our society and, consequently, a growing problem with our medical system, and that is the problem of efficiency. A scheduled induction is efficient. Forceps and episiotomies, efficient. A scheduled cesarean, even more efficient.

Central nurseries instead of in-room care? Now that's efficiency. And it introduces a safety problem completely unrelated to the medical problems hospitals routinely introduce.

I have heard that some hospitals keep babies in the same room as their mothers. I would like to applaud those hospitals. They are off the hook (for the rest of this conversation, anyhow). If no one but the parents of a child are authorized to remove that child from the hospital room, if it were not so common and even expected for nurses to whisk your baby away for routine care, we would not have to read about Mychael.

Before you OB nurses decide to have an old-fashioned lynching, let me just say that I know this is not an entirely common occurrence. I realize that some women want a break after labor, especially if they've been pumped full of drugs. I know that hospitals are often busy and frequently troubled financially; under such circumstances, efficiency must surely be a tempting motivation. But consider a (more or less) one-in-a-million chance that it is your baby that disappears, then consider this: is in-room care really that much more difficult?

Of course there will occasionally be medical circumstances that require a separation of infant and mother. But by and large, babies are born healthy; were it not so, our species would not have lasted long enough to invent hospitals. In those healthy cases, why not just leave mother and child together? Aside from arguable benefits to psychology, to breastfeeding, to bonding, and so forth, it's apparently the safest thing to do!

I admit to some bias; both of my children were born in free-standing birth centers with excellent midwives and compassionate nurses. My children did not leave the room they were born in until it was time to go home. There was no chance of mixup, no opportunity for kidnapping. On top of the peaceful environment, the excellent care, the freedom from insanely restrictive liability-induced hospital policy... my children were born safe.

It's a bias with which I am comfortable.