Arguing for a Return To Home Birth
Abby Epstein's new documentary, "The Business of Being Born," lucidly presents the well-researched thesis that America's current epidemic of newborns delivered by cesarean section (up some 50% in the last decade), and the cultural and medical marginalization of midwifery and home births, are a boon for American insurance companies and the medical establishment, not for mothers and babies. Produced by former talk show host Ricki Lake, "The Business of Being Born," which opened this week at the IFC Center, is gravid with historical detail, statistical evidence, and damning testimony from both sides of the issue.
Archive photos and footage reveal the dawning prejudice against the "old-world" custom of home birth at the beginning of the 20th century, the chilling mid-century practice of drugging women in labor with the ominous "truth serum" of pulp literature — scopolamine — and the birth defect ravages of the morning sickness drug thalidomide in the 1960s. Interspersed through this gruesome lesson in medical anthropology are sound bites from contemporary midwives and home birthing advocates, an animated sequence depicting the cyclical folly of relying on epidural anesthesia and C-sections to shorten labor, and sporadic visits with a half-dozen expectant mothers, including Ms. Lake, all pursuing alternatives to institutional births.
Eventually Ms. Epstein herself joins the ranks of the pregnant and militant, and her story, truncated though it is (she is arguably the last American documentary filmmaker reticent to appear on camera in her own movie), becomes the most emotionally engaging and wrenching aspect of the film. "The Business of Being Born" was clearly conceived as a polished piece of pro-midwifery agitprop, but Ms. Epstein and her unborn child's sudden nosedive into a statistical percentile unflattering to the film's core argument is so much more compelling than the dozens of talking heads representing midwife organizations, the World Health Organization, and the pro-home-birth European medical establishment that it almost undoes all the finger-pointing that has come before. Though an undeniably persuasive medical wake-up call, "The Business of Being Born" offers even more trenchant proof that in documentary filmmaking, raw empathy trumps empirical fact every time.
