Business of Being Born vs. One Born Every Minute

       

         While watching both “The Business of Being Born” and “One Born Every Minute” I noticed some immediate similarities in the attitudes of the mothers. In both instances, home births and hospital births, the mothers seem to be anticipating the labor and not completely knowing what to expect. The fathers initially seem less sympathetic at the hospital in “One Born Every Minute”.  The fathers were more interested in their own discomfort it seemed during the hospital birthing whereas in home birthing the fathers were more concerned with connecting with their partners and being an active part of the experience. I’m not quite sure whether it is a product of “show business” or whether the majority of hospital births are this dramatic, but it seems there are a lot more issues being displayed and complications during “One Born Every Minute”. However, in “The Business of Being Born” the home birthing was displayed as a serene and spiritual experience that had a fairly large success rate in the movie at least, which drastically differentiates it from the complex and dramatic hospital births in “One Born Every Minute”.

                In the show “One Born Every Minute”, birthing is seen as a process that is arduous and painful and somehow less emotionally enriching as it had been portrayed in “Business of Being Born”. One could definitely make the connections about a hospital being an industry just like any other one of the mothers arrives for a scheduled C-Section, her second C-Section to be accurate. It turns out that her first C-Section was due to “non-progression”, which can either mean the baby was not progressing and was considered to becoming “high-risk” or that the baby was not progressing as fast as the doctors would have liked, considering an average labor is supposed to be about 24 hours but the average hospital labor is around 8. Also, as seen in “The Business of Being Born” the mothers were allowed to move around and adjust their bodies with the contractions while the mothers in the hospital in “One Born Every Minute” were restricted to bed and were discussing pain medications and pitocin, which is a drug to speed up labor. One perfect example of the reverence of medicine over alternatives to alleviate pain was Carissa called the anesthesiologist “God” because he would take away her pain, pain probably intensified by the pitocin and her position laying flat on the bed.

                In “One Born Every Minute”, as opposed to the construction of the beauty of home birthing in “The Business of Being Born”, the doctors and nurses ran the show and hardly let the mothers’ bodies be in charge of their own labor. The most knowledgeable (doctors/nurses) were revered over the experience itself, when in actuality they have no investment or commitment to their patients. And like I mentioned earlier, childbirth was feared as an unrelenting difficult task that added pain and discomfort as a means to an end, while during home birthing labor was a special experience shared by the mother and her partner to connect with the child.