Buisness of Being Born

The main purpose of the Business of Being Born was to introduce natural births and midwifery to America, as well as provide critiques of hospital births. One of the movie’s main focuses was that natural births can be emotionally rewarding. Most of the mothers that were included in this film reasoned that they already have or would choose natural births because they wanted the moment to be special. They wanted to feel a bond between their children. This movie included footages of this happening, and explained that the bonded feeling is a result of the brain releasing oxitocin, which makes the mother and child momentarily feel as though they are merged. Personally, I felt that seeing the mothers and children hold onto each other after the birth was my favorite part. It showed their reliance and necessity for one another. But more importantly it showed the melancholy of hospital births. A great 99% of the mothers are unable to feel this, and even though the babies are reaching out in the hospitals they are unable to grasp their mothers.

One critique of hospital births was that it was like a “dominoes effect.” They would give the mother epidural to ease out the pain, but it also slows down the birthing process. So in order to speed it up, they give the patient pitocin, which forces the mother to give harder and more frequent contractions. As a result, the doctors give them the epidural to ease those contractions, and thus it becomes a never-ending process until the mothers are convinced that they “need” a cesarean section. It may appear that this whole hospital process is done for the mothers, however as this movie has states, hospitals are a business. Hospitals are mainly concerned with its efficiency and convenience. Almost everything that is done in a hospital, as far as births are concerned, is done for those two things; everything down to the position that the mothers are in, the timing of the births, the speed of the births, and the type of births they’re having (vaginal or c-section).

Even though this movie was more on the side of natural births, the producer, Ricki Lake and the director Abby Epstein were not completely against hospital births. It appeared that they decided to have natural home births (or would have liked to, in Epstein’s case), but felt that it is also necessary to have hospitals as a backup (which it was, in Epstein’s case). In some ways, I think that they were simply trying to propose a transaction from hospital births to home births with a midwife. This movie was very similar to the class polls that we did about our feelings towards normal and natural births. In both AWOB classes, many people would “accept normal births but consider alternative for self.” However this movie is criticizing, but still accepting normal births and recommending home births to others, which was the next level on the polls. After watching this movie, I can’t help but to wonder; if we were to do more research and went into greater depths, would our opinions and feelings naturally shift up to that next level and begin to attempt what was done in the movie?