The Business of Being Born

Today was a raining Saturday afternoon and I was motivated to do nothing. Nothing except more research on baby related issues of course!

I bought the magazine Mothering yesterday and fell in love. A magazine geared toward someone like me - how nice! Especially when I often feel as though I am in the minority. They also have a website (mothering.com) with a message board section with everything a pregnant girl like me could ever want to talk about. Very cool!

Anyway, this issue had a very good article about Attachment Parenting. Not so much about the individual aspects of this parenting style, but basically just showing the research and philosophy BEHIND this parenting style and why it works and why it's natural and what we are born to do. It goes right along w/ our motherly instincts and is what babies truly need to become emotionally well off children and adults. It was pretty interesting.

I already kind of figured that my parenting style would lean towards attachment parenting (though maybe not every aspect, I am still unsure) as it just seems like common sense, but the article and research behind it definitely made me want to learn more, so I plan to get The Baby Book by Dr. Sears (of the Sears family) and possibly a few others in that library. I am excited to learn more!

After this I decided to have my husband check to see if The Business of Being Born was on Netflix so that we could watch it through our Xbox. I was pretty sure it was and I've been putting off watching this film for way too long.

We watched it this afternoon and I definitely loved it, just as expected. Honestly, I think this is a great starting point for someone curious about birth in our country (required watching for anyone who is pregnant?) but I am so far past that point that I don't think I really learned anything new. Yet, I was still glue to my TV and felt like crying through some of it. It was incredibly moving and scary at the same time and like I said, I already knew most of it!

However, I am so glad we finally watched it because there were so many professionals; both certified nurse midwives, OB/GYNs, and people from places like The WHO, who gave their expert opinion. All which were pretty much in favor of taking normal birth out of the common hospital setting we have today. Like in the book Pushed, even OBs admitted that the way our country, and ONLY our country, does things is so ass backward and wrong. It's all because of money and legal issues which is ridiculous.

It made me feel really good about our decision to switch from an OB to a midwife to have a better birth experience, whatever that might be (I fully recognize there is a need for intervention in some rare cases). I know that we are at least better set up for the success we are hoping for and really proud of our decisions, the research I've done, and the route we've chosen to go. I think everyone should get to choose, but it makes me so sad to think that women just don't KNOW about what is really going on in there. My favorite guy in the film was the man from The WHO. He was hilarious and said something to the effect of 'if you want a humanized birth, get the hell out of the hospital'.