This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
In 2012, Miranda Dinda had a lot on her plate.
She was 18.
All her friends were getting ready for college and busy being teenagers.
But Miranda was on a different path.
She was pregnant.
So I was very nervous, and I felt really uneasy but excited at the same time.
To calm her anxieties, Miranda did some research on childbirth.
I decided I wanted a home birth.
For that, she would need a midwife.
She searched for months for someone who could come to her apartment in rural Pennsylvania.
Eventually, she found a woman who seemed perfect.
We'll call her m, her first initial, to protect her privacy.
From the very first moment they met, Miranda knew everything was going to be fine.
She said she had been a home birth midwife for over a decade.
She was no nonsense, the mother of eight.
She was very open and honest and friendly, so she definitely seemed like someone who I could trust.
About an hour into that first meeting, Em brought up a question that struck Miranda as strange.
She said, have you ever considered not.