The Business of Being Born

I finally got around to watching The Business of Being Born earlier today and while it is a great documentary on the medicalization of childbirth in the United States that should be required viewing for all parents-to-be, it also made me incredibly sad and angry. It makes me sad that most women here in the US miss out on having the kind of empowering and transformative birth experience like I was fortunate enough to have and like most of the women in this film have as well. It makes me angry that almost every woman I know who has given birth in the last 10-15 years has experienced a “cascade of interventions” that ultimately lead to a C-section…except for the women I knew through my attachment parenting groups, where the opposite was true – only one or two had C-sections. What was the difference? The majority of the attachment parenting folks chose midwives. The film points out that midwives attend 70-80% of all births in Europe and Japan but the number in the US is only 8% – and the US has much higher maternal and infant mortality rates than the countries where midwifery is the norm. It’s just another example of how we pay more for worse outcomes but beyond that, it’s heartbreaking that most women are so removed from the reality of natural childbirth that they don’t even know what they are missing.