The Business of Being Born

I am just going to preface this, by saying that I am not pregnant haha. That being said, I do plan on having children one day and am interested in learning about child birth and have a general interest in all women's issues, that is why I minored in Women's Studies in college haha. So, that is why I was interested in watching this documentary.

The Business of Being Born was very good, and very different from what I was expecting. I thought, based on the title that it was going to be about how expensive it was to have a child, but it was actually about midwives and the experience that women have when they give birth in the hospital.

I think that I learned a lot from the film and now am more sure that I definitely want to give birth in a birthing center, instead of a hospital, as long as I am a low-risk pregnancy. It might be cool to give birth at home too, but that will depend on where I live at the time. I don't see my NYC neighbors appreciating me screaming and crying in pain next door for 15 plus hours or however long it takes for me to pop a baby out haha.

Here are some interesting facts that I learned while watching the movie:

• Midwives attend more than 70% of the births in Europe and Japan
• In the U.S., midwives attend less than 8% of births
• Some women are actually having designer births now, where they schedule a C-Section and then have a tummy tuck, rather than giving birth naturally.
  
• The U.S. has the second worst newborn death rate in the developed world and also has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among all industrialized nations.
• Less than 10% of births take place at home
• Since 1996, the cesarean section rate in the U.S. has risen by 46%
• And finally, midwives generally cost just $4,000, while hospital births can cost around $13,500
• NYC hospitals have some of the highest C-Section rates in the country
  

Hopefully, those aren't too many facts for you, and that you also find them as interesting as I did. Basically, the film said that there was a smear campaign against midwives, so more women started giving birth in hospitals.

Because of the way that hospitals work if a women's delivery is taking too long, the doctors and nurses will encourage the women to speed it up. They first given women pitocin, which makes contractions longer, stronger and closer together. The pitocin makes the delivery so intense, that the hospital then gives a woman an epidural for the pain, but that slows down the woman's contractions. This causes the doctors and nurses to increase and decrease these two drugs back and forth. Another drug used to speed up a pregnancy is cervidil. All of these drugs often lead to a C-Section because they put the baby in distress. Another reason for the high C-Section rates is litigation, hospitals want to say that they did everything they could do to avoid litigation. I never fully understood how important a natural birth was until I saw this movie.

One quote from the movie was: "If you want a humanized birth, the best thing to do is to get the hell out of the hospital."