The Importance of Your own Understanding

In this 25th week of pregnancy my baby should weigh about a pound and a half and be about nine inches long, but of course how would we know for sure? Even ultrasound scans are not always accurate.  This brings me to another issue that I've been hearing/reading about lately, and that is this idea that the baby's due date should dictate exactly when labor will begin. This isn't an issue that I would consider myself an expert on but I just want to point out some things that I think people need to think about.  I was talking to a friend who's wife is pregnant and she's due early March however the Doctor says the baby is already weighing 7 lbs and because we don't want her to give birth to an 11 lb baby we will probably be inducing her 2 or 3 weeks before her due date.  I asked him if they would induce her with Pitocin, he didn't know how they would induce her but he also had never heard of Pitocin, didn't know what it was or what effects it has on the body. So I explained to him how it worked and then I suggested to him "don't you think if the baby was ready to be born your wife would go into labor on her own?"  What really bugs me about this is that it was obvious that he and I assume his wife also, had not done any research of their own. They have completely given their pregnancy and birth experience over to their Doctor.  I'm not saying we should not listen to our Doctors but when we are educated about a subject then we are able to ask better questions, even a simple question like "well how do you plan to induce me?"  But if you don't already know that there are multiple ways to induce labor then you probably aren't going to think to ask that question.
Another similar story that my Bradley instructor shared last Thursday was about a pregnant woman who was also told that her baby was already weighing something like 8 or 9 lbs therefore the baby was ready to be born therefore we should induce labor now. So they did and long story short, this unnatural labor process led to a C-Section and as it turned out the baby only weighed 6 lbs. The Doctor was wrong? (Sorry if I didn't get that story exactly right but I think I made my point). C-Section for a 6 lb baby in a woman who was not even high-risk, that's UNNECESSARY.  Yes there are some cases where inducing labor is necessary, maybe the placenta has stopped functioning properly or other rare cases like that. C-Section can save lives, it saved my life when I was born, but we have to admit that lots of unnecessary ones are performed in our hospitals. I've also said before that sometimes the use of drugs in labor and delivery can cause a C-Section to become necessary when it otherwise would not have been. 
I think it's important for women and men to know the facts, do the research so that you have some control over what happens during your pregnancy. Yes it's short but it's also an important experience.