Not that I’m planning on giving birth anytime soon, but I’m fascinated with the process. I’ve never known much about “home births,” but this movie has opened my eyes to the facts about it. I’m definitely going to look back on this when the time comes.
Director Abby Epstein (“Until the Violence Stops”) starts her film with a 3:25 a.m. visit by a midwife to the Brooklyn home of a woman about to deliver her second child. In the apartment all is calm: The woman labors; her husband gently rocks her; the midwife unpacks her equipment; a large, blue birthing bath centers the living room. There is not a doctor, hospital bed or drug catheter in sight. Epstein’s unsubtle point is that, for a normal, low-risk pregnancy, the hair-raising, middle-of-the-night race to the hospital is unnecessary. To most, this will seem like unwise propaganda. But the film presents convincing statistics: Although the United States spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on delivering babies, the rate of infant mortality is the second worst in the developed world. And caesarians are at an all-time high, comprising 29.1 percent of births in 2004. Among the alarming data – in the past 10 years, C-sections have increased by 40 percent, at an annual cost of $14 billion. Why are we doing so badly? According to the strong cast of nurses, doctors, medical anthropologists and international health bureaucrats assembled by Epstein and executive producer Ricki Lake (“Hairspray”), American doctors are trained in drug inventions and surgeries, not in normal births. And midwives, those experts in the psychological and physical trials of natural childbirth, have largely been removed from delivery rooms. Meanwhile, in Japan, Singapore, Sweden, Finland and Norway – the countries with the lowest infant mortality rates – midwives are the main source of care for 70 percent of birthing mothers. The film is rich with scary testimony. Lake recounts how during the delivery of her first child the introduction of one drug caused “a big snowball effect.” She received an epidural, a lumbar injection that kills pain below the waist, but it slowed down her contractions, so she was given pitocin, which made the contractions longer, stronger and closer together, leading to another epidural.
This is the domino effect that Lake and others argue is responsible for the increasing number of emergency C-sections. Another reason, presented with astonishing bluntness by Dr. Michael Broadman, chief ob/gyn at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, is the hospital business. American hospitals and insurance companies want patients in and out of bed as quickly as possible; C-sections can be scheduled in advance or can cut short the labor process.
“Somebody clearly is going to step in and stop this trend” of high C-section rates, warns Broadman. “Or else we’re going to get to 100 percent.” The film is also rich with emotionally gripping and graphic scenes of childbirth. Lake is shot giving birth in her bathtub at home, the infant bobbing out of the water and onto her mother’s chest. But for director Epstein, who became pregnant while shooting “The Business of Being Born” and planned for an at-home birth overseen by a midwife, things did not go as planned. She went into labor early, had a C-section and gave birth to a 3-pound, 2-ounce boy who flourished from advanced preemie care. This sequence of hospital scenes saves the film from presenting an overly rosy picture of natural childbirth in one’s living room. But it does not dilute the film’s pro-midwife, anti-intervention and generally feminist message – a message summed up by midwife Ina May Gaskin:
“A woman, for as long as she lives, will remember how she was made to feel when she gave birth. It can be a beautiful, incredible, empowering, life-altering experience or it can be a devastating, traumatic, scarring, literally and figuratively, experience.”
