Whole Life Times: The Business of Being Born

February 2008 | Art & Soul

The Business of Being Born

Your baby is a miracle, not a profit model

By Eric Larson

While some 70 percent of lads and lasses in other developed nations take their first breath in the home, attended to by a midwife, some 99 percent of Americans are born in hospitals, under the surgical spotlight — their mothers stuck with needles and pumped full of drugs that will likely erase any memory of the pain.

If that initial statistic doesn’t draw you in to The Business of Being Born, Abby Epstein’s plain-spoken, though impassioned documentary about the unnecessary medicalization of modern American maternity, then certainly some of the others will:

The U.S. has the second worst rate of newborn deaths in the developed world.

Nearly a third of babies in the U.S. are born through Cesarean section, which is now the most commonly performed surgery in the country, costing some $14 billion per year.

In one survey, more than eight in ten physicians said they’d performed a C-section to avoid a negligence claim.

The Business of Being Born, dreamed up by Epstein’s comrade (and the film’s executive producer) Ricki Lake, whose firsthand experiences birthing in both a hospital and at home made her a vocal advocate of the latter, suggests that technology — which over the past hundred years has continually introduced new procedures and new, sometimes dangerous, drugs — is the prime culprit.

The other offenders, so common in America’s managed care culture, include the maximizing of profit, the calculated avoidance of litigation and get this, the “inconvenience” of natural (that is, prolonged) labor and the need to speed things up in the delivery room.

If the film’s head is the citation of these dizzying statistics — backed up with testimony from midwives, mothers and even a number OB/GYNs — its heart is in the footage of the women it follows from visits to the midwife to giving birth in their homes — including Ms. Lake.

Absent from these birth scenes is the sense of trauma, of emergency; absent are the doctors; absent are the bright lights, the monitors, the heavy eyelids of supine and sedated mothers begging for an epidural through gritted teeth.

What we see instead are mothers, standing, not sitting, taking an active role in the passage of the child from there to here, or, as one interviewee describes it, “laying claim to her victory.” Sure, these births are painful — unthinkably painful — but also “empowering” and “otherworldly,” completely life altering. What we see, and what these mothers are working so hard to remain present for, are miracles.

While the cultural tide might be too strong to expect a return to home-birthing and midwifery any time soon, Epstein’s film might just become the beginning of a conversation about how America came to honor the product — the child — but have so little reverence for its production and its delivery.

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