Watch This, Not That! (Pregnancy Edition)

We’ve all seen the book, Eat This, Not That! and some of us probably own it. If you haven’t seen it, take a minute to check it out. We think it’s a fantastic concept….substituting healthier food options for ones that have negative long-term effects if made staple of any person’s diet, but that our society has come to accept and even promote as culturally “normal”.

The comparison might be made between fast food commercials and typical birth “documentary” shows on television these days. Just as we’d never look to McDonald’s commercials if we wanted to educate ourselves on nutrition, we’d never look to A Baby Story to educate ourselves on the process of childbirth. In doing so, we would effectively be forming a skewed view of birth based on information presented in a show whose ratings depend entirely upon the entertainment value of it’s content. The fact of the matter is that drama sells and it’s a pretty popular product. In the midst of all this drama, though, there was one birth documentary show on television that we are aware of that truly represented normal birth in all its variations. House of Babies was a 26 episode documentary of natural birth and was shot at the Miami Maternity Center in Miami, Florida. Shari Daniels and her staff of midwives at the Miami Maternity Center didn’t have the reviews that thier counterparts from hit TV show, Deliver Me, do….let’s take a moment to analyze why. We’ll start with a quote from the “about” section on Deliver Me’s Discovery Health page:

“Alane Park, Yvonne Bohn and Allison Hill are doctors and mothers busy juggling careers in medicine while raising young children….Deliver Me is set primarily at their medical office, where they see a full schedule of patients, and also at Good Samaritan Hospital next door, where they may be called at any time of day or night to deliver babies or perform surgery. Take an intimate look at these extraordinary women’s busy lives. Get a front-row seat for all the drama, emotion and challenges — both professionally and personally — churning around these skilled doctors every day.”

Sounds action-packed, no? Try a trailer for a typical episode on for size:

We’ve managed to catch their show several times and honestly can’t say that we’ve ever seen a natural birth portrayed. What we have seen over and over again, though, is that the premise of their show is the drama that surrounds their patients’ births, as is exemplified in the clip above. It is our humble opinion that more often than not, these doctors (and their peers all across the country) perpetuate the misconception that modern women aren’t able to birth without their assistance and the OB-induced (pardon the pun) drama that generally surrounds it is essentially a result of that brand of practicing medicine. In fact, we really wonder if any one of these three OBs has ever actually witnessed a natural birth. By “natural”, we don’t just mean vaginal, either.

Merriam-Webster defines “natural” as: “being in accordance with or determined by nature….having or constituting a classification based on features existing in nature”. Our definition of “natural” falls more in line with that. Natural, non-intervened, non-surgical vaginal birth with no time constraints or pressure where the laboring mom is the one calling the shots and she has freedom to move about and position herself as he body leads her…..y’know, just like all the other mammals do it. Truth be told, most natural births are pretty uneventful until just before the main event and as such, they’re not really the makings of hit dramatic reality television. In stark contrast, most of the births that we see portrayed on television are dramatic and generally involve somebody (most often an OB) pushing their agenda and the fear that something will go horribly wrong without help and thus instilling that fear into the laboring woman who then submits herself to the mercy of said OB. Because, really….who’s going to choose a dead baby over a ceserean, right? Kinda makes you wonder if it isn’t something that’s purposefully done, doesn’t it? We all know how important ratings are.

One glaring problem we see with a ”reality” show pabsed on typical hospital birth is that millions of first-time moms watch these shows and are using them as their primary exposure to what birth is about. When your birth is approached from a place of expecting to need medical intervention, then medical intervention is what you’ll get. As such, we concur that one of the most important things to keep in mind when you seek sources of information about birth on television is what sort of ratings the program has. We get that television is supposed to be entertaining. We really do. We watch a lot of it….but who wants to sit around and watch a laboring women who is fully informed and knows what to expect breathing peacefully through her contractions for hours on end? That is what natural birth looks like and frankly, it bores all but the most dedicated of us to tears.

Labor and birth for mammals has existed for much longer than obstetricians have and somehow, reproduction in the human race has survived and even thrived without them until recently. What prompted that change? What brought us to the place, as a race, that we feel like we aren’t capable of birthing our young without the intervention of a trained medical professional? A quote from one of our favorite men on the planet is will fit in nicely here. Marsden Wagner once said that “having a highly trained obstetrical surgeon attend a normal birth is analogous to having a pediatric surgeon babysit a healthy 2-year-old”. We wholeheartedly agree and our view of it is that our expectations of a process reflect the outcomes of what the majority of our exposure to that process is….in simple terms, the way you’ve always seen it go down is the way you expect it to go down when you’re the one baking the bun. It follows that if your sole source of information about pregnancy and birth is reality television drama, then that is what your expectation of your pregnancy and birth will be. Everybody knows what a self-fulfilling prophecy is, right? Anxiety, fear and stress are three of the biggest enemies of and hinderances to natural birth and putting yourself and your unborn child in the hands of a care provider who is trained to look for pathology will have exactly the outcome that you expect it will. Is that the birth story you want to write?

Some places to begin heading down the path of thinking differently about birth are: