I watched this DVD and loved it! There are so many good quotes, facts, and links that I'm just going to list them in the order they come in the film and let them speak for themselves. I wish I would have thought to note who said each of them. Here is a link to the website, you can see all the experts they talked to listed there.
"We were meant to have babies. Don't just turn your body over to medicine."
"Women of the Earth: Take back your birth! Just as you enjoy sexuality, you can enjoy your birth."
"The [fetal] monitor was designed to prevent over-intervention in birth and it got used in exactly the opposite way. The section rate in the US soared from 6% when the monitor was first introduced to 23% in just 10 years of use."
"As long as women really know why they are choosing hospital, home, or birth center, then go with that 100%. But if you go to the hospital because that's what everybody else does, or expects you to do, then you're missing out on something. You just surrender to something that's not so truly your own."
"It's like a sacrafice, I think, that a mother can offer. 'I'm gonna go through this pain for you to really come out in the way you need to come out. Because it's no just me.'"
"You need to birth at your own pace, in your own time."
"'Emergency' c-section is more common Monday-Friday only in America."
"Don't look at the contractions as something you have to go through, or get over, or get past. Look at it as embracing your child into this world."
"Physiologically, birth doesn't happen the same way around surgeons [and] medically trained doctors as it does around sympathetic women."
"When a woman births on her own power, and finds her rhythm, and her postures, and her sounds, and her moment of ecstasy at birth, then she is a changed woman and she is a fierce mother."
"To be realistic is to expect your birth to be wonderful." - Naoli Vinaver, CPM
Books to read:
"Inner Strength" by Stoger
"Birth As We Know It"
"Birth by the Numbers" - a segment after the film about US birth statistics. These are not quotes unless noted.
When America is compared to like countries, large, industrialized, democratic nations, there are 16 to compare.
The US is last in prenatal care sought in the 1st trimester. (All other countries have government-funded health care.)
We have the highest death rate. When you look at just white, non-Hispanic, native-born we are still last.
If you only look at those who got prenatal care in the 1st trimester, we go up to 13/16.
If you add more than 16 years of education (through at least college) then our rate is much better: 3/16. But how much of our population has their first child after getting a college degree? Not a big percentage.
All the other nations mortality rates started low and dropped over a 5-year period. We started higher and were the ONLY nation to have the rate increase over the same 5-year period.
Maternal death went up along in the US when it went down in every other country.
Comparing all age groups, the c-section rate went up 50% over 10 years (1990-2000).
All elasticities go up at the same rate (which means that no one group is skewing the results).
There is evidence that maternal request is not what is propelling the rates to continue up.
"If there's even a 1% chance of a terrorist act occurring, we must treat it as if it were a certainty," VP Dick Chaney. "When you set up a system that focuses on the 1% of problems that might occur, you undermine the care of the 99% of mothers who don't need those services," John Whitridge Williams speaking about c-sections.
Books and links they suggest at the end of the "Birth by the Numbers" segment.
"Our Bodies, Ourselves"
"My Body, My Baby, My Choice"
"The Medical Delivery Business"
www.motherfriendly.com
www.thebirthsurvey.com
www.childbirthconnection.com
www.cfmidwifery.org
www.birthnetwork.org
www.mothersnaturally.org
www.imbci.org
www.lamaze.org
www.dona.org
www.internationalmidwives.org
www.waba.org.my/
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