The Business of Being Born.

"The Business of Being Born is a passionate ground-level examination of home childbirth, anchored in a scene in which its executive producer, Ricki Lake, the actress and former talk-show host, gives birth to her second child in a bathtub," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "That graphic scene, and several other unblinking sequences of home birth attended by a midwife, are intended to erase any stigma from the situation.... The Business of Being Born is not overtly political. Its feminism is palpable but unspoken."

Updated through 1/13.

In the Voice, Julia Wallace senses "an obliviously upper-class, sanctimoniously yuppie-crunchy slant to the whole production. Still, [director Abby] Epstein and Lake have crafted an absorbing, thought-provoking inquiry into what modern birth has become and how to make it better."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Epstein "about the need to change the perception of birth practices, how her own pregnancy affected the film, and her childhood obsession with The Wizard of Oz."

Updates: "Yes, there is footage of a number of women giving birth (most of it not terribly explicit, if pornographically intimate) and the pendulous breast count is off the charts, but The Business of Being Born is remarkable for the way it handles those difficult scenes with a mixture of delicacy, gravity and humor, capturing the exultancy of a moment so human it is almost mundane, yet so transcendent that it is almost more than human," writes Michelle Orange. The Reeler also brings back Jennifer Merin's April interview with Epstein.

"Doctors periodically appear to provide less one-sided thoughts on the hospital-vs.-home birth issue, but The Business of Being Born so often presents that choice as between powerless terror and ecstatic harmony that it weakens its more cogent points, such as the deleterious role played by insurance companies and doctors' selfishness in creating an environment inimical to offering a woman options in the decision-making process," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

Updates, 1/11: In the New York Sun, Bruce Bennett finds the doc "lucidly presents the well-researched thesis that America's current epidemic of newborns delivered by cesarean section (up some 50% in the last decade), and the cultural and medical marginalization of midwifery and home births, are a boon for American insurance companies and the medical establishment, not for mothers and babies."

"As issue docs go, The Business of Being Born is about as well-put-together and non-aggravating as the genre can get - which isn't saying much, but it's still a small victory," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"The blatant bias only hurts the documentary," argues Liz Nadybal in Nerve.

Jennifer Merin talks with Lake for the New York Press.

Slate's Dana Stevens finds Born to be "a generous-spirited tribute to the practice of home birth.... Unfortunately, the movie is also a propagandistic brief on behalf of the home-birth movement that's so selective in its presentation of information that it makes Michael Moore look like a fat lady in a blindfold holding a pair of scales."

Update, 1/13: "Lake and Epstein are not in fact trying to stigmatize other women's choices about how and where to give birth," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Instead, they're trying to introduce an entire universe of history and information that should inform those choices, and that the medical establishment has virtually erased from American memory. Whether the bizarre character of American healthcare overall can ever be changed is an open question, but no one, male or female, pregnant or childless, who sees The Business of Being Born will ever see the hospital maternity ward as a normal environment again."

Posted by dwhudson at January 9, 2008 12:45 AM