Expecting Better is a data-driven approach towards pregnancy. Oster is a economist at Brown, specializing in health issues in the developing world. When she got pregnant, she turned her research skills on pregnancy, trying to determine the validity of conventional wisdom.

The results are a solid gloss of meta-analyses. Oster knows her way around a search engine and knows how to read a paper. But she's not an OB, nor any kind of medical doctor. In practical terms, it's more credible than your friend on Facebook, but in epistemic terms, there's a real difference between a professional and someone with Google Scholar, no matter how careful they are. Some of the recommendations are surprisingly commonsense. Listeria is awful, but rarely associated with cold cuts, so sandwiches are probably fine. Some are calculated to offend everybody. Drinking during pregnancy is fine, short of actual binge drinking and clinical alcoholism. Home births have higher risks than hospital births, though it's hard to tell in America because home births are done by wealthy white women who have pretty good outcomes in general. And doctors are too quick to induce labor, and too quick to go to C-sections when continual monitoring shows a dip in fetal vitals, rather than knowing that labor is hard for everyone involved.

There some good stuff here, and the basic thrust that you need to pick your risk tolerances and then follow the evidence, even when there isn't a gold standard randomized clinical trial, is a solid viewpoint. But this book is very much a product of a specific type of person (white, educated, economics, Ivy League), and doubles down on one of the worst attributes of that type of person by assuming those lessons are universal.