BIRTH is a one-hour public radio and audio documentary about the practices and perceptions of birth in America. Starting with early perceptions, we move through the process of birth beginning before labor, continuing during labor, and following the actual event. With a multiplicity of voices woven with sound we examine the process of birth from an emotional, physical and philosophical perspective. As we move back and forth through time and from person to person, we discover how stories from our lives, history, media, and the medical institution enter into the culmination of the actual birthing process. Birth is a rite of passage through which all human beings pass. Is it the same as it ever was? Why do some women feel deeply empowered by their birth experiences and others feel stripped of their motherhood? Where do our expectations about how we give birth come from, and how do they play out when we approach the event? What is the baby's experience? And what about the father's role? Turn on the television or watch a movie and you're likely to see birth portrayed as an emergency medical procedure. Is this a true depiction of what happens? Perhaps, and yet there are many ways in which to approach the experience. Above all else, we are biologically predisposed to be interested in this topic. Quite simply, when it comes to birth everyone can relate.

In 1985 a book appeared that changed the way people thought about the history of science. Until that time, the history of science had usually meant biographies of scientists, or studies of the social contexts in which scientific discoveries were made. Scientific ideas were discussed, but the procedures and axioms of science itself were not in question. This changed with the publication of Leviathan and the Air Pump, subtitled Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life; the book’s avowed purpose was – “to break down the aura of self-evidence surrounding the experimental way of producing knowledge.” This was a work, in other words, that wanted to treat something obvious and taken for granted – that matters of fact are ascertained by experiment – as if it were not at all obvious; that wanted to ask, how is it actually done and how do people come to agree that it has truly been done.

The authors of this path breaking book were two young historians, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, and both have gone on to distinguished careers in the field they helped to define, science studies. Steven Shapin will be featured later in this series, but How to Think About Science begins with a conversation with Simon Schaffer. Producer David Cayley called on him in his office at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge where he teaches.