Day 7: The Business of Being Born

The first time I witnessed a baby being born, I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of it. It was January 23, 1996, my 24th birthday. My sister Amy wasn't due for another week or so, but I'd talked to her on the phone the night before and encouraged her to sit in a dark, quiet room and chill out in a rocking chair, and have a little talk with her body & with the baby and let them know that tomorrow would be the birthdate. The next day she went into labor, and though the plan had not been for me to attend the birth, I was invited because of the whole birthday thing (I had been born on my grandpa's birthday, making the whole thing even extra special), along with my parents.

The labor took awhile. She had an epidural, but as I recall, it wasn't that effective. She pushed for a long time, and when she said at one point, "I can't do it! I can't do it!", my dad calmly said from the corner of the room where he'd stationed himself throughout the process (he did not move from that corner, despite my mom's occasional urging for him to take a peek at the miraculous proceedings down below), "Well, you gotta do it, so you're gonna do it." And so she did it. And seeing a human head coming out of her vagina was the most surreal experience I ever had. And I loved the whole process. So I decided to be a midwife, then decided to go to med school to be an OB/GYN, which I did, and now I'm a psychiatrist. I just didn't dig medicalized birth, with most women getting pitocin and/or an epidural, and being strapped to a monitor throughout labor, and not having any clue about what was going on. Also, I didn't want to pay $100,000 in malpractice insurance every year. And I didn't want to go into a profession where it's pretty much guaranteed you will be sued. And I didn't like the surgeries associated with OB/GYN. But I did like schizophrenics, so it all worked out in the end.

This movie was produced by Ricki Lake, who has something to say, dammit. She does not think it's cool that 1 in 3 births in the US end in Cesarean section. Say what? That seems high to me, but that's the stat they gave, and even if it's not that high, it's definitely too high. Between 1970, when continuous fetal monitoring was introduced, to 1980, the rate of c-sections increased from 5% to 25%. Unfortunately, there was not an accompanying drop in infant or maternal mortality. This movie posits that it's in the financial best interests of hospitals for labors to go as quickly as possibly (as each patient brings in money, so you want to get people in & out ASAP) so they start pitocin unnecessarily, and the pitocin makes contractions ridonculously painful, so the woman needs an epidural, and then she can no longer feel the unnaturally strong contractions but the baby can, so the baby then goes into fetal distress, and the mom gets a c-section. How shitty is that?

Based on my experience as a medical student (where I participated in many doctor-assisted deliveries, as well as midwife deliveries, because I specifically sought them out), I'd choose a midwife if I were to have a baby (assuming the pregnancy was otherwise normal and not high-risk). And Ricki Lake thinks you should, too (and the movie advocates mostly for home births with a certified nurse midwife). For the most part, this movie steers clear of the "this is the way I had my baby, so this is the best way" bossiness that often creeps into the natural vs medicated birth debate. It keeps it's focus on the history of birth in the US in the last century, and on outcomes for moms & babies. And you get to see a couple of really awesome natural home births, and one emergency C-section (premature breech labor with intrauterine growth retardation).

I was really impressed with the portrayal of the C-section as the necessary choice in the situation, and there didn't seem to be any judgement passed on the mom for having one. Until Ricki Lake says to the mom eight months later, "Do you feel CHEATED? Do you feel like you missed out?" Fuck you, Ricki Lake. Just because this women didn't get to have the birth that you deem to be the best kind doesn't mean the value of her experience was any less than yours. I think that's the "it's all about me and MY experience" holier-than-though attitude that many women who advocate for natural birth unwittingly give off, and it angers a lot of women on the "other side." There are plenty of women who had transformative birth experiences with the help of epidurals or painkillers, and I imagine many women who've had c-sections don't feel cheated, particularly ones who clearly needed them (like the woman in the film).

But aside from this little slight, the film was more about presenting the facts to women rather than passing judgement, and I would recommend it to any pregnant woman who is unfamiliar with midwifery or the idea of natural birth. And I would also point them to this awesome unmedicated hospital birth on Youtube, and to my friend Beth's birth story, and Dooce's birth story, too.

Rating: fully dilated & 70% effaced