I just finished watching The Business of Being Born
- and all of the extra footage. When the movie ended, I still wanted more. The "extras" are definitely worth watching, with many good and very valuable points made, as well as some closure that I felt was missing at the end of the film.
It was good. It was very good. I think every woman needs to watch this, ideally with her spouse, and ideally early in pregnancy or even before. There is so much that women in this country don't know about how birth works, both from the physical perspective and from the medical perspective.
Did you know that the U.S. ranks
2nd-to-last in the industrialized world in infant mortality? And it is
on the rise? The only industrialized country with a worse record for infant mortality is Latvia. We're tied with countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic. If our medical system and medical advances are so great, why are so many babies dying? And
mothers are dying, too. According to an OB/GYN on the film, we spend twice what countries like Japan and the Netherlands pay for each birth, yet have significantly lesser outcomes. One big difference? Those countries have a significantly higher proportion of midwife-attended births, and save obstetricians for when they're really needed - when there's a real problem. When complication-free births are allowed to be intervention-free, you get fewer
iatrogenic injuries and deaths. There are also fewer
pre-term babies when pregnancies are allowed to continue until the baby is ready to be born.
I, personally, could've used a box of Kleenex (or, rather, Seventh Generation facial tissue) for the film. There are so many highs and lows in the movie - the horror of unnecessary interventions leading downhill quickly; the rush of emotions and endorphins as a baby is born into the water at home. I've seen both sides of birth, and so react very strongly both to the injustices and the triumphs.
Birth is an absolutely amazing process, and one of the points that the movie makes very well is that it is a huge disservice to women that they are not being told that; that they don't know that birth is empowering, engaging, awe-inspiring, elating, overwhelming; that they don't have the chance to experience the hormonal bond between themselves and their newborn in the moments after birth; that they are not an active participant in the most incredible experience they'll ever have. Women who birth at home don't do it because they're super-human. They do it because they are human - and human women are designed for - and capable of - this most amazing thing we call birth.
