The Business of Being Born

I was strolling the aisles of our local movie rental store at 39 weeks pregnant when a little documentary by Ricki Lake called The Business of Being Born caught my eye.  I thought to myself this will be fun and interesting to watch.  Little did I know I was about to spend the next hour with my jaw hanging open in shock of what I was learning.  The wool over my eyes was being removed and an ugly little truth was emerging...hospitals and doctors all over the country are deciding how you should deliver to make more money.  


I'm not saying that they are all out to get you but there is no doubt that a lot of them  are making money at our expense.  Did you know that a normal vaginal delivery costs around $13,000 while a Cesarean section can cost as much as $35,000?! Maybe that has to do with the 40% increase in Cesareans over the last 10 years or the snowball effect of getting an epidural.  Here's how that works...


~The epidural kills pain but it also retards natural contractions. To keep contractions active, a drug call pitocin is often administered. The pitocin makes contractions longer, stronger and closer together, causing more pain, and then consequently another epidural. This then requires more pitocin, which again causes longer and stronger contractions, and stress to the baby such as a decrease in heart rate. Ultimately, this often triggers an emergency Cesarean section. 


~In one 1999 survey, 82% of physicians said they performed a C-section to avoid a negligence claim.


~In America, midwives attend less than 8% of all births and less than 1% of those occur outside a hospital. At the same time, the US has the second worst newborn death rate in the developed world.


What happened to homebirths, midwifes and doulas?  I had often wondered why there had been such a cultural shift and these birth plans are no longer the norm.  Somewhere along the way we have become to believe that having a homebirth is reckless and unsafe.  The truth is it's not and  I believe it to be quite the opposite.  Here are some interesting studies comparing the safety of a home birth to hospital births. 


~A new report by the World Health Organization, published in the international medical journal, Lancet, identifies complications from cesarean surgery and anesthesia as the leading causes of maternal death in developed countries, including the United States. 


~Another report by Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD, coordinator of Integrative Psychiatry and Systems Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine Program in Integrative Medicine, comparing 1,046 home births to 1,046 hospital births found negative outcomes consistently higher in hospital births. These included a fetal distress rate six times higher in hospitals, a respiratory distress rate 17 times higher in hospitals, babies requiring resuscitation 3.7 times higher in hospitals, maternal postpartum hemorrhage three times higher in hospitals and 30 birth injuries in the hospital compared with none occurring during the homebirths.


I highly encourage everyone to take time to watch this film, get educated and empowered to make a knowledgeable decision on how you want your baby's birth to be.  It's true when they say that "You will never look at birthing the same."  Thank goodness for that!


*Statistics and info taken from The Business of Being Born press kit.