Green Oasis

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.