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MPAA RATING: Not Rated
Red Envelope Entertainment, International Film Circuit
Documentary
86 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters January 9, 2008
Birth is a miracle, a rite of passage, a natural part of life. But birth is also big business. Compelled to explore the subject after the delivery of her first child, actress Ricki Lake recruits filmmaker Abby Epstein to question the way American women have babies. Epstein gains access to several pregnant New York City women as they weigh their options. Some of these women are or will become clients of Cara Muhlhahn, a charismatic midwife who, between birth events, shares both memories and footage of her own birth experience. Footage of women having babies punctuates The Business of Being Born. Each experience is unique; all are equally beautiful and equally surprising. Giving birth is clearly the most physically challenging event these women have ever gone through, but it is also the most emotionally rewarding. Along the way, Epstein conducts interviews with a number of obstetricians, experts and advocates about the history, culture and economics of childbirth. The film’s fundamental question: should most births be viewed as a natural life process, or should every delivery be treated as a potential medical emergency? As Epstein uncovers some surprising answers, her own pregnancy adds a very personal dimension to The Business of Being Born, a must-see movie for anyone even thinking about having a baby. (Red Envelope Entertainment) |
DIRECTED BY
Abby Epstein
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Critic Reviews
| 75 |
TV Guide
It's a serious and well-researched consideration of natural childbearing vs. hospital delivery that explores the larger social conditions and assumptions that shape women's choices.
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| 75 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
More propaganda than cinema, and at an hour and a half, its exhaustiveness diminishes its impact. But Epstein anchors the film nicely with her own pregnancy, which occurs while the documentary is in production and comes to an unexpected conclusion before shooting ends.
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| 75 |
New York Daily News
Passionate, enlightening and unabashedly one-sided, Abby Epstein's documentary is not for everyone. But at the very least, it should be seen by every pregnant woman in America.
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| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Tamara Straus
A powerful, frightening look at America's delivery room.
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| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
Gary Goldstein
This unflinchingly shot picture is not for the squeamish. Epstein and Lake's own commitment to you-are-there realism is remarkable as well, each bringing new meaning to the phrase "naked truth."
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| 70 |
The New York Times
A passionate ground-level examination of home childbirth.
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| 70 |
Salon.com
Lake and Epstein are not in fact trying to stigmatize other women's choices about how and where to give birth. 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.
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| 70 |
Village Voice
Julia Wallace
Epstein and Lake have crafted an absorbing, thought-provoking inquiry into what modern birth has become and how to make it better.
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| 60 |
Variety
Documentary seems best suited to cable: Lake's informal, Oprah-like concern invites the intimacy of home viewing. But the chick-chat approach in no way undermines the gravity of the problems the docu addresses.
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| 50 |
Slate
Dana Stevens
It's full of moving (and surprisingly ungross) filmed deliveries, including those by Epstein and Lake themselves. 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.
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