Birthing Big Business
By: Carolyn Mejia
Tags: Birthing Industry, Foucault, Pregnancy, Business Of Being Born, C Section

Monopolizing the Birthing Industry via “Medical Professional Opinions”

Becoming a mother is an exciting and wondrous blessing.There are multiple ways of entering motherhood: Birthing, Adoption, Fostering, and other legal avenues. All routes are valid and worth exploring for women looking into becoming a caring mother. One of the main things to consider before diving into motherhood is exploring which option is the healthiest (mentally and physically) for themselves and the baby. Regardless of the route, “mommies-to-be” know they must do extensive research beforehand in order to ensure the best quality of life.

However, in this social climate and internet crazed era we live in today, the American Health Care System is able to “uncomplicatedly” exploit the vulnerability of expectant mothers. Today it is very easy to surf the internet and find a myriad of benefits to hospitalized births but not often do we hear about the dark side of birthing at these facilities. In the documentary The Business of Being Born by Abby Epstein, the filmmakers interview parents and medical experts about the journey of motherhood to find out the realities of maternity care. While they follow expectant mothers to see what option is best for them, they unveil the crude realities behind the birthing industry.

Traditional American births involve doctors, drugs, obstetricians, and of course, surgery. For years now, women have been told the false narrative that they are not responsible for their child’s birth. That is an extremely dangerous tale to perpetuate because the mortality of the mother and the baby are blindly being placed in the hands of doctors that just want to go home at the end of the day. Mothers confine,trust and fully comply with these doctors because they’re the professionals. However in the documentary, we learn that Cesarean Sections are the quickest and most efficient way for hospitals to turn beds and turn profits. According to the Cleveland Clinic,

“ If the cesarean is an emergency, the time from incision to delivery takes about two minutes. In a non-emergency, a cesarean birth can take 10 to 15 minutes, with an additional 45 minutes for the delivery of the placenta and suturing of the incisions.”

In addition, C-Sections are glamorized in Hollywood by celebrities and marketed as quick and painless. Of course there are multiple reasons why a c-section would be the preferred alternative as mentioned in the hyperlink above, but women do not have enough exposure to the dangerous and complications of this major surgery. Instead, they are told that they do not know how to birth and must be assisted. Not only does this narrative condone the exploitation of mothers by the American Health care system, it is banking off the backs of these confused and ill-informed women.

In The Making of Punishable Bodies, Michel Foucault presents an array of ways the human body has been abused and used for capital. Hospitals and doctors are using their name and title to advise women to undergo a quick surgery which in turn results in these women being rushed to be induced. Scheduling births is easy to keep log of how much money will be coming in the doors at the end of each month. It’s a business model that appeals to the majority of American women because women think the doctors know best.

Foucault writes in reference to patterns of history:

“ In every society, the body was in the grip of very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations… To begin with, there was the scale of the control: it was a question not of treating the body, en masse, ‘wholesale’, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it ‘retail’, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself.”

Mothers should not be too quick to subscribe to these medical opinions and find what route truly is best for them and the baby. In the documentary, we see that midwives are an exceptional resource and even alternative to drug-induced births. Midwives may help facilitate and nurture the birthing process. The stigma behind any type of outcast-ed birthing method should be dismantled and American Culture should be less discriminating with the many ways women safely deliver a healthy baby.