Be Afraid, be Very Afraid, to be PREGNANT IN AMERICA

Ask 10 women on the street the best place to have a baby and the vast majority of them will tell you you’d be an idiot not to give birth in a hospital. You can ask 10 men too, as this film does, but frankly most men are idiots when it comes to birth – having never done it themselves. It’s safe in the hospital, all those folks would tell you. There’s emergency equipment there “just in case” there’s a crisis.

And that, my movie-loving friends, is all the reason you need to pick up Pregnant in America. Because the fact that most people think it’s a form of child abuse not to give birth in a medical facility is a crime in my humble opinion (which I am entitled to a certified birth attendant). That’s because, as documentarian Steve Buonagurio discovers, the vast majority of births in America should not require emergency equipment and the vast majority of birth-related crisis are actually caused by being in the hospital.

While the U.S. boasts about having the most advanced medical system in the world and more than 90 percent of American babies are born in the hospital today, the nation has an astonishingly high infant mortality rate. It falls behind countries like, let’s see, war-torn Slovenia on the World Health Organization’s infant mortality ranking list. And just one ranking point in front of Croatia.

Steve and his wife Mandy Buonaugurio didn’t understand the magnitude of those odds when they discovered they were pregnant with their first child.

But a healthy and personal distrust of hospitals caused them to want investigate all the options when it came to where and how to have their baby. As the Buonaugurios begin to investigate which provider to use during pregnancy and birth, they learn some of the more shocking realities about the business of being born in hospitals.  Doctors who schedule surgery for convenience, insurance companies that refuse to pay for lower cost midwifery care, women who have to travel to Canada because hey cannot fine a doctor who will deliver a baby vaginally after a C-section. They learn how midwives have been disenfranchised in our country, while they are the chief providers of birth care in countries with much higher survival rates for moms and babies.  They get info on the much-maligned home birth option.

Pregnant in America does an admirable job of mapping the system of the money and power that drives America’s maternity care and all but denounces lower-cost midwifery care. It is one of three good films out this year that exposesthe devastating impacts our nation’s medicalized birth crisis is having on women and babies. The Business of Being Born or Orgasmic Birth both tackle the issues using many of the same experts but with different foci.

This film takes some unnecessary and sensational side roads on birth-related issues that the other films doe not. I have to applaud Buonaugurio for challenging the off-label use of the drug Cytotec for labor induction and highlighting its possibly life-shattering effects. But while using Cytotec for inducing a woman is dangerous, the film fails to mention that there are other very critical off-label uses for the drug. Most homebirth midwives count on Cytotec as one of the most effective medications to stop the rare instance of postpartum hemorrhaging.

In their film Steve and Mandy Buonaugurio travel across the United States and Europe interviewing experts and in the end, their research convinces both that a midwife-assisted birth is the best and safest option.

They have a beautiful birth by their own accounts. What happens next is another story, which I hate to give away. In the end, this couple gets a post-birth experience that begs even more questions than it answers – about birth, about hospitals, about the hard choices parents face from the time of conception.

You don’t have to be pregnant to see this film. If you are a woman, love a woman, have a child who will be a woman or were born to a woman, you and they need to know the sad facts presented in Pregnant in America.

And then force change.