St. Norbert Collaborative - Connections

The documentary The Business of Being Born (2007) critiques the American hospital birth system as over-medicalized, unnecessarily expensive, and dangerous for both mothers and infants. The goal of the film is for more low-risk pregnant women and their partners to inform themselves of their birth options and opt for natural childbirth rather than be subjected to hospital interventions such as labor induction and caesarean section. After viewing The Business of Being Born, we realized that while we both agree with its central argument—that natural childbirth is a healthy and necessary alternative to medicalized childbirth—we were troubled by the gender essentialist assumptions made by several of the individuals interviewed in the film. For example, these essentialist beliefs sometimes suggest that anything “natural” is always superior or that women have an ancient, even biological intuition about how to birth and parent. These beliefs rest on singular notions of “womanhood” that limit women’s potential and shut down critical, complex discussions about birth and parenting. Book jacket

To further explore the issue of gender essentialism in the natural childbirth movement, we analyzed roughly thirty books, films, articles, and medical studies on natural and medicalized childbirth. Gender essentialist discourse is present in many of these texts, and we are currently co-writing a scholarly article on this trend and its implications for feminists, parents, and natural childbirth advocates. This article will be published at an opportune moment, as the sequel to The Business of Being Born—a four-part documentary entitled More Business of Being Born—is being released on November 8, 2011. We plan to incorporate this film into our analysis, and we hope that our work will start a critical discussion of the gender essentialist assumptions behind many such natural childbirth texts.