The Business of Being Born
A friend recently turned us on to The Business of Being Born, a movie about home childbirth. Netflix got the movie to our mailbox today. We had already watched it online, but accidentally left it in the top of our queue.
I decided to take advantage of the accident to show my four-year-old some women giving birth. I selected a scene of two different women giving birth in their homes, avoiding the more disturbing photographs from less enlightened times of twilight sleep births where women were often restrained to their beds in a drug-induced delirium (morphine to reduce pain and scopolamine to induce amnesia). My wife was a little pensive, worrying that we might scar our little girl for life with the strangeness and evident pain of childbirth. I put my faith in children who handle mature subjects quite well, thank you very much, if the adults in their lives give a little guidance and aren’t visibly embarrassed or afraid.
After she watched two nude women with newborns coming out of their nether regions, I asked what she thought about them giving birth. She simply responded “Good”, asked a couple of questions, talked about when she would give birth when she’s older (because she’s too small to carry a baby in her belly, she said), then went on playing.
The movie itself is informative but one-sided. It featured only a couple clips of skeptical doctors. The best aspect of the movie is that it shows several women giving birth in their homes with competent, well-trained midwives making sure that their needs are met and watching for the small percentage of births requiring medical intervention. Most of the births themselves seemed anti-climatic, like it was the most natural thing in the world to give birth in your living room—which is the point I suppose. The director had planned on a home birth but had a breach presentation so she had to have an emergency cesarean section, but the rest of the women filmed required no hospitalization. This film raised my awareness and acceptance of this childbirth option.
Tags: childbirth, children, education, home birth, The Business of Being Born
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chandelle
said,
March 1, 2008 @ 4:22 pm
i wasn’t particularly impressed with the movie but i think it’s important to realize that the reason it’s so one-sided is because the other side is so pervasive in our culture. think about the way that childbirth is presented in the media: always immediate, as an emergency, as terrifying and painful, as something that causes women to lose control and throw things at their husbands. it’s extremely difficult in our society for women to seek out choices in childbirth or to even educate herself fully because it’s heretical in so many circles to even consider that the american birth machine might be broken. it’s a lot to be up against, in an attempt to educate the masses about birth as a normal, healthy, potentially transformative experience.
as a woman who chooses homebirth i’m grateful to see this line of thinking be considered at all in the mainstream, but i was still disappointed with the presentation and progress of the movie. ‘course, might just be that ricki lake’s voice make me feel like bugs are crawling under my skin.