Monday, December 7, 2009

Childbirth movies

I've never really watched a real childbirth movie before but I figure I should do a little research. The other day we watched a quick one online and it freaked me out for a couple of days. As amazing as it really is, it's also overwhelmingly scary and kinda gross at first.

Well last night Igor and I watched a documentary called the "The Business of being born" which has made me see childbirth in a whole new light. There are two main things that I took away from it.
1: The U.S. is the only developed country that has more hospital births than home births. If I remember correctly, other developed countries average about 70% home births with midwives while the U.S. averages about 1% home births. The most interesting statistic was that there are significantly more deaths of mothers and babies in the U.S. than those other developed countries. This movie reasons that it is because child birth is overly manipulated in hospitals with drugs and forceps and vacuums etc. (it never dismisses the importance of hospitals for complicated pregnancies, emergencies, etc.)
2: Immediately following natural childbirth a woman releases large amounts of oxytocins which are basically "love" hormones that are crucial in creating an immediate loving bond between a mom and baby. They showed about 5 different women giving birth in this film and the look of bliss and amazement as they reached down and grabbed their baby as it left their bodies and placed it on their breast was intense. They described it as an unfathomably amazing experience and it made me want to experience that too.
Before I began my research I felt like i would definitely want an epidural and just let the hospital do their thing. I'm learning that when you use drugs, it suppresses those critical oxytocins and interferes with the birth process in other ways too.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I think I'm going to try to go natural! I never thought I'd say that :)

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