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THE POPCORN REEL PRESENTS IN
THEATERS: "THE BUSINESS OF BEING BORN"
Baby Business: The Cost of Being Born Free Filmmaker and mother Abby Epstein
talks about her new documentary "The Business of Being Born", now playing in
select American cities
"We went to a lot of the women's television
networks trying to get funding figuring that Ricki (Lake) was a television
personality and they might be able to finance the film that way, and you
know, none of them really would bite. I think that for whatever reason sort
of, kind of really afraid to go against the status quo in terms of the whole
medicalization of childbirth," added Ms. Epstein, who said that obtaining
information was difficult to say the least.
"Just the filming itself -- it's now become such a hostile environment in a lot of these labor delivery wards with the malpractice situation -- they are so, so uptight about filming . . . they would not even let a couple going to have baby videotape their own birth for their own personal purposes." Ms. Epstein, with her boyfriend and film cameraman Paulo Netto gave birth during the documentary detailed instances where only the labor process was being filmed. "Even as professional filmmakers, they would not let us film the moment of birth', due the liability for malpractice. Disturbingly enough, to hear Ms. Epstein tell it, television networks, including those geared towards women, refused to finance the film or show it on television, fearing that they would lose their advertisers if they financed or aired it. "Really, the only way to do this film and get this information out there was to do it independently." Whenever commerce, politics and convention collide, the idea conveyed is that the the license to depict, film or finance a project detailing the history of women giving birth in America over a 100-year-period would come up against stiff opposition in the form of companies, namely those in the medical profession and those elsewhere that are aligned to the best interests of what Ms. Epstein calls the "medical industrial complex". "It's very, very tricky territory," said Ms. Epstein who talked about the challenges of getting financing for the film, dealing with a subject that she termed "one of the next big feminist issues of the century."
The United States is still in the smallest
minority (only one other country Australia) where more than 90% of the
childbirths in the country are still conducted in hospitals. C-sections are
escalated, to the point where some women inside the U.S. have been seeking
them out when they are not necessary s medical emergencies. Mayra, one of
three expectant mothers in "The Business of Being Born" mentions the
phenomenon of "designer births", where women she says get tummy tucks not
long after having elective caesarean sections. "I don't go to big enough
parties as those other women do," she quips on camera. Mayra is implicitly
referring to stars like Victoria Beckham, who according to Ms. Epstein's
documentary scheduled her c-section childbirths around the football season
of her world-famous husband.
On the topic of hospital births and
homebirths, "a lot of the studies that are done are funded by pharmaceutical
companies," said Ms. Epstein, but the studies that give a more complete and
thorough picture of homebirths and their outcomes in the U.S. and Canada,
were detailed in such publications as the British Lancet, a medical journal
publication that asserted that the homebirth successes were equal to if not
greater than hospital births. The director described the politicizing
response to such journals, including an effort by the establishment medical
boards to designify the study's impact. "American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists, they immediately come out with another statement issuing
their stance against homebirth. There's no study behind it -- it's really
more, sort of a media war . . . if you really want to find good solid
studies to really understand what's behind this fear-based mythology . . .
they're out there . . . they just don't get that much press," said Ms.
Epstein, who mentioned the occasional story that would appear in The New
York Times, but by and large are absent from American mainstream press.
"But it's out there if you look for it," she said.
"It's staggering people don't know about it,"
said Ms. Epstein of midwife home birthing.
"I think that generally there are women who are very nervous about the birthing process and are more than happy to surrender all of their power to the experts," the director said, adding that the trust in doctors, in the system and in the technology makes most women "feel safe." The trouble with that mindset, Ms. Epstein said, was that there's no such thing as a perfect birth. "Of course you sue," she said, "because you've been set up to believe that they're gonna take care of everything and as long as you do A, B, C and D, you're gonna have a perfect birth. And that's just . . . impossible."
Under the two models of giving birth as stated
by Ms Epstein, there is "the medical model of care" and "the midwifery model
of care", the second of which she posits gives the woman much more autonomy
than in a hospital setting. "I think the midwifery model of care really
encourages an expectant mother to take more control and power and
responsibility for her own pregnancy, to be able to find her inner voice and
to listen to her instincts, and that kind of goes through the whole prenatal
process and the birth, so that at the birth it's really the mother who has
the wisdom and the midwife is asking the mother, 'well, how do you
feel comfortable, do you want to be in the pool, do you want to be in the
shower, do you want to be in the bed, what's your body telling you to do?'"
The psychological and the emotional aspects are more confluent under this
model, said the director, giving a woman a more holistic and complete aspect
of what is happening to her and her body during the nine-month process plus
labor and childbirth itself.
Ms. Epstein posited that the process of giving birth was "very much a sexual process, very much like having sex, or having an orgasm -- you know -- to have a really smooth, successful birth, you need to feel safe and comforted, and you need to feel privacy and you can really surrender to this." Ricki Lake, a good friend of Abby Epstein's for almost a decade, was ultimately the key to the documentary being made in the first place. Ms. Lake, a former actress and television daytime talk show host, first gave birth at a hospital several years ago to her son and was profoundly disappointed by the atmosphere in which it took place. She resolved to give birth in an environment that was far more comforting to her -- namely home -- and her second child, also a boy, was born in her own bathtub in the peace and tranquility of her New Jersey home, with a midwife and Ms. Lake's husband on hand to witness the event. The video of the birth of her second son is shown in Ms. Epstein's documentary, showing an ecstatic Ms. Lake, who in later and prior comments during "The Business of Being Born" could be said to have an epiphany of sorts when realizing that the birthing process could be taken home with her in a place where she was most comfortable. "I think it can be such a hugely transformative life experience . . . it really helped (Ricki) kind of change as a person . . . that's a huge opportunity you're sacrificing (when having a hospital birth)," Ms. Epstein said.
Ms. Lake, who executive produced "The Business
of Being Born", became a figure of inspiration to the director, researching
in detail childbirths at home assisted by midwives versus at hospitals,
where from her estimation it appeared that doctors were less interested in
the comfort of the process for the mother to be than what time the doctor's
shift ended. After some encouragement and pushing, Ms. Epstein herself
decided to become a mother, if almost reluctantly. On becoming pregnant
during the filming of "Business", "my instinct," she declared was, "'well,
let's just ignore it -- I'm just gonna be a filmmaker behind the camera.'"
In addition to Ms. Lake, Ms. Epstein's editor encouraged her to film several
of the director's appointments at clinics.
From there, the film took on a life of its
own, one that Ms. Epstein had hardly expected, or imagined, even in her most
wild and unlikely dreams. "We had been working on the film for two years
before I became even pregnant." Being pregnant, she said, wasn't really in
her short term plans. "It was all sort of serendipitous. And I was really
nervous about the whole thing," in the context of the film, which the
filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn, New York envisioned as an expert-driven
film, not a personal film ala "Super Size Me". Ms. Epstein was not about to
make herself as a guinea pig as Morgan Spurlock did in the 2004 documentary
on fast food. "It was a little bit uncomfortable for me," she said, on her
own personal transformation from documentary filmmaker to documentary
subject.
Despite her own discomfort about her personal
birthing process being part of the documentary, she was grateful for the
experience that "Business" taught her. "I'm so indebted to the film, you
know, for sort of helping me through my birth process because I know for
sure that had I not made the film, had I not done all this research, had I
not you know, been working on this with Ricki for the past two years, I
absolutely am 100% sure that I would have been one of those women who just
didn't take a lot of time to research this, just kind of went with whatever
doctor and showed up at whatever hospital and just said, 'give me the
drugs as soon as you can, and let's get this over with,'" positing that most
women who give birth find themselves in this predicament.
Abby Epstein mentions that her film clearly "was not about pretending that we don't need modern medicine," and when speaking of Ms. Lake's experience said that she was skeptical about homebirth, not unlike how most women feel when hearing about midwifery birthing, a process which the medical industry in America had historically demonized. "She gave me a book called, Spiritual Midwifery, by Ida Mae Gaskin, which is a really fun groovy book about birth on the farm, like in the sixties." After Ms. Epstein read it, Ms. Lake showed her a video of Ms. Lake giving birth at home, and was "staggered".
"She really kind of led me to water", Ms.
Epstein said.
As for right now, the film has been
well-received. When it world premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival
last April, the director said that "Ricki and I were both actually shocked.
We were shocked at how much press that the film was getting. I
mean, we knew it was a good documentary . . . but we were shocked at how
much media interest there was." A lot of people were touched and
deeply moved by the film. "There was an overwhelming emotional
response, like emotional response people had to the film, and I mean people
all across the board, you know, like gay men to older men, to, you
know, young teenage girls who weren't ever thinking about having a baby . .
. we realized that with Tribeca we hit a nerve here!", Ms. Epstein said,
commenting that some of the moviegoers at one screening of the film said
"'this was like 'An Inconvenient Truth' for women!'" Ms. Lake and Ms.
Epstein realized that the film was "a revolution, a movement", one that had
literally come into being through word of mouth, spreading like wildfire.
With everything said, Ms. Epstein is happy about one other thing: "I think what I'm most proud of is that the film is not polarizing people." Ms. Epstein said that the film has screened at hospitals including Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn, and numerous other places across the United States, as well as screenings in Canada and Australia, among other countries.
In a nutshell, Ms. Epstein defines the effect
of her film this way: "I think we've managed to bring these issues to light
in a way that have a strong point of view but has enough balance that the
medical community can't really ignore this film, you know, and they don't
really feel attacked by it. They feel like it raises serious issues
that affect their profession too. " The filmmaker added that from the time
young girls start having their menstrual cycles and going to the
gynecologist, they should be getting midwifery practice so that they do not
feel so alone. "It's a lot less intimidating. Anybody can tell
you -- if you go and see your OB-GYN for your annual exam, you usually wait
in the waiting room far longer than you ever actually get to speak to the
physicians. It's a usually kind of a very rushed appointment and it's
quite uncomfortable to try to bring up other issues or questions, and you
definitely feel like the doctor is on a very quick timeframe. When you
see a midwife it's not uncommon to sit for an hour, or an hour and a half.
And talk about whatever may be going on. I mean, for young girls that
might be more about sexual questions. They might have more questions
just about sexuality." Original story with photos
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