Making a Mother

The documentary The Business of Being Born (Rikki Lake & Abby Epstein) has been made available for viewing online. That's nice. What's not so nice is the message. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. But as my partner and I sat down to watch, it was pretty clear within the first two minutes that all of the positive popular press this movie has received has been seriously undeserved, and worse, uncritical. (A crucial exception is this Slate piece.) Not only did I not like this movie for its dubious historical, epidemiological and professional commentary on birth in the United States, I also didn't like that it was horribly elitist, classist and, yes, racist. This in all of the worst ways that information packaged for general consumption can be: coercively.

The underlying message of the film is that the right birth is a normal birth (the film’s term, not mine) and a normal birth is one that happens at home, unmedicated and without any intervention. There was absolutely no call to concern for women with no access to insurance or perinatal care, women with pre-existing conditions, women of advanced age or with high risk pregnancies, teen moms, et al. Basically, anyone that didn’t fit the bill of perfect health and fall into the category of upper-middle class American woman, was bound for the label of “bad mother”. That is shameful.

My partner referred to it as the NY/LA “boutique” image of the perfect childbirth. Of course, we all want women to have this intervention-free option. But for some of us, there may not be the luxury of an uncomplicated pregnancy and childbirth. And that can make us feel like we've lost control. It became pretty clear by Rikki's third hat change and overly dramatic forward-leaning, finger chapelling attentiveness, that this movie was primarily about women trying to either regain or maintain that control. Not until I was 1 hour and 9 minutes into the movie did I realize that it was not about control of one’s own childbirth experience, as the film lauds, but about control of other women and their experience. Sadly, 'expert' clinicians are also used to meet this end. At one point in the film, Dr. Michel Odent (the OB who also believes men should not be present at childbirth) makes the claim that when a woman gives birth by “caesarean section she does not release [the natural] flow of "love hormones" [oxitocin], so she is a different woman than if she had given birth naturally...and the first contact between mother and baby is different.” Here Odent compares women to monkeys who will reject their babies if delivered by c-section. Upon hearing this, I quite astonished myself and my poor partner, by bursting into tears.

Childbirth is a wonderful, moving, emotional, life-changing event for every woman; the amazing birth footage in this documentary attests to that. What is worrisome, however, is the shocking amount of misinformation the film conveys about childbirth, accompanied by a self-affirming (and often righteous) adamance about the importance of the “right” birth and becoming the “right” kind of mother. This is interspersed with an extreme lack of criticality in regard to the 'big picture' of various practices by those interviewed, including women, social scientists and health care providers. (I should say here that there was a striking absence of L&D nurses in this movie. Not one was interviewed!). Neither was there even a smattering of sympathy for women who have births that don’t go as planned. As a twenty-five year-old first time mom, I had a complicated pregnancy and The Kid was, in the end - thankfully - delivered safely to my arms by cesarean section. But I have known women who have had horrifically complicated pregnancies necessitating close monitoring of both mom and baby; mothers who have had perfectly normal pregnancies and lost their babies in what seemed to begin as an uncomplicated birth; husbands and children who have lost their wives and mothers because of unforeseen problems.

The empowerment of women is not as simple as demedicalizing childbirth. But it is as simple as avoiding shaming women into taking chances for fear of being a “bad mother.” Empowering women doesn't mean demanding we all make the same choices and become the same kinds of mothers; it means allowing us to empower ourselves to become the mothers we choose to be.

Two thank-yous: First, to the nurse midwife Cara Muhlhahn who in the movie describes her own difficult first childbirth, and of whom we get to see footage as she goes into the pain-induced dementia of despising everyone around her. It’s the best footage in the entire movie. And to all of the good docs and nurses out there who have blogged more accurate information about childbirth practices in the United States, inclusive - and even encouraging - of home birth.