REVIEW: The Business of Being Born

I recently watched The Business of Being Born for the second time. The first time I saw it was almost 5 years ago. It was interesting to note the difference in my reaction this time around. I still maintain that every expectant family should see this film! Personally, I'm excited to watch their new film, MORE Business of Being Born.

THEN

• I saw the film at a pre-screening about a year after the traumatic birth of my daughter.
• I didn't recognize a single person in the film aside from Ricki Lake.
• The C-section in the film bothered me. In a way, I almost felt it made the film a failure. I wanted the film to show how wonderful homebirth can be resulting in low, low rates of transfer.

NOW

• I'm now a certified doula and have processed and healed from my birth experience.
• I immediately recognized probably 75% of the experts they interviewed and knew them by name without having to read the subtitle.
• I'm glad the C-section was included because it shows how well a midwife and backup doctor can work together to get the care that mom needs when an emergency arises. However, I don't think they did a great job of explaining why she needed to transfer. I know enough now that I was able to figure it out and then confirmed my theory by watching the interviews in the bonus features. Here's the explanation. Not everyone is a candidate for homebirth. Abby was a candidate until she went into early labor with a breech baby. The combination risked her out of homebirth. At the hospital, we learn that the baby had intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). This explains why mom was measuring so small earlier in the film. IUGR babies have big heads and small bodies. This is not a good combination with a breech baby as the body can emerge but the head get stuck. Therefore, a Cesarean was warranted. So, I'm totally okay that they included this in the film because it wasn't an unncecessarean. I just wish that it would have been explained better.

Moving on, here are some of my favorite quotes from the movie and points raised by the theme of the film. I missed a few of the speakers/titles but tagged the ones I knew. Still, you just need to watch it. It's SO good! The preview/trailer is at the bottom of this post.

U.S. MATERNITY CARE

• Maternity care in the United States is in crisis. - Dr. Marsden Wagner
• What the medical profession has done over the last 40-50 years is convince the vast majority of women that they don't know how to birth. - Nadine Goodman, Public Health Specialist
• Are we benefitting mothers and babies or not? - Ricki Lake
• The U.S. has the 2nd worst newborn death rate in the developed world. The U.S. has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among all industrialized countries.
• When you look at our data and the amount of money we spend versus the outcomes we get, it sucks! There are countries who spend a third of what we have and have a lower infant mortality so more doesn't mean more in this case and maybe less is more. - Dr. Jaquez Moritz, OB/GYN Saint Luke's Roosevelt Hospital
• People in our culture spend more time and effort researching to buy a stereo system, a car, probably a camera than they do checking out what their choices are for birth.
• What we have to rediscover is that birth can be easy when we don't try to make things too complicated.

MIDWIVES

• Midwives attend over 70% of births in Europe and Japan and less than 8% in the United States.
• Trained homebirth midwives are incredibly skilled at what they do. The fact of the matter is that they bring pitocin, oxygen, equipment for suturing, and recessitation of the baby.
• For a normal, low-risk woman it's overkill going to a doctor, it's just too much. The doctor is not really excited about things when they are normal. - Dr. Jaquez Moritz, OB/GYN Saint Luke's Roosevelt Hospital

HOMEBIRTH

• In 1900, 95% of births in the U.S. took place at home. In 1938 it was 50%. By 1955, it was less than 1%.
• In a supported environment the outcomes of homebirths are very, very good and consistently at least as good and generally better than a hospital birth. - Eugene Declerq, Ph.D. Professor of Maternal & Fetal Health Boston University
• We spend twice as much in this country, per birth, than any other country in the world. This is one of those very rare instances where cheaper is truly better. - Dr. Marsden Wagner

C-SECTIONS

• There is clearly an association of induction and cesarean delivery. - Dr. Michael Silverstein OB/GYN
• The cesarean rate climbed from 4% to 23% after the introduction of the electronic fetal monitor. - Robbie Davis-Floyd, medical anthropologist
• There was a study that came out many years ago, which showed that if you looked over a 24 hour period the peaks in C-sections were 4 in the afternoon and 10:00 at night. - Dr. Michael Brodman Chairman of Dept of OB/GYn at Mount Sinai Hospital
• The literature is very clear that having a vaginal birth statistically is the way to go. Dr. Michael Brodman Chairman of Dept of OB/GYn at Mount Sinai Hospital

EMOTIONS

• A woman, as long as she lives, will remember how she was made to feel at her birth - Anna, doula.
• Many people have described birth as a right of passage and it is certainly a life-altering experience and it can be a beautiful, incredible, empowering life-altering experience or it can be a devastating, traumatic, scarring, literally and figuratively, experience.
• What are the basic needs of women in labor?
• We knew that feelings affected birth. - Ina May Gaskin, Founder of The Farm Midwifery Program

HORMONES

• You get the highest oxytocin rush that you will ever get in your life when you give birth naturally. - Robbie Davis-Floyd, medical anthropologist
• In monkeys, if they give birth by C-section they are not interested and will not take care of their babies because the love-hormone cocktail is not released. So you wonder, but what about our civilization, what about the future of humanity. If most women have babies without releasing this cocktail of hormones, can we survive without love?

For more information, visit www.thebusinessofbeingborn.com.