The Business of Being Granola

Any pregnant woman has probably heard of or watched the documentary "The Business of Being Born." I watched it while I was pregnant, and it sent me into a frothing frenzy of rage against doctors and hospitals and traditional medicine: "How dare they tell me how to have my baby?! What the fuck do they even know?! Get your unnecessary interventions away from me!!"

The basic message of this documentary is: if you give birth in a hospital, YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A C-SECTION!

Apparently, all a doctor wants to do is shoot you full of Pitocin and cut you open and make your baby drink formula and vote Republican.

So, I'm in nursing school right now. OK, I'm in pre-nursing school right now. But whatever. One of the very first things we learn are the Ten Patient Rights. I won't go through all ten of them because they're kind of obvious and boring. Like the right route... don't eat a suppository. Duh.

One of the ten rights is the Right to Refuse. That's right, folks. If you're in the hospital - for anything from an ingrown toenail to brain cancer - you can tell your nurses or doctor that they can take that medication and shove it up their ass. Or you can be nicer and just say no.

It's the same deal with birth. If you've been dilated to 5cm for the past 7 hours and they want to give you something for it, you can say no, and they can't do shit about it.

If they want to give you Pitocin to speed your labor and you say no, they can't just sneak it into your IV. Why's that? Well, if they do and you find out about it and are prickly enough, you can sue the everloving fuck out of the hospital and whatever doctor put his or her stamp of approval on that order. Because forcing any kind of medication onto someone (who is in their right mind; none of this applies for people are are incompetent) is illegal. If a doctor snuck medication into your body without your consent or against your will, that doctor will lose their medical license.

This documentary isn't even accurate. They're talking about how Europe is so ahead of the USA as far as birthing is concerned, and then this old hippie dude brings up thalidomide as a point. Thalidomide wasn't used in the US. It was used in Europe. Stupid hippie. Get your shit straight.

I had a natural birth. In a hospital. The really mega-hippies will say that no it wasn't natural simply because it was in a hospital. And to those hippies, I say fuck you, and I don't have to explain my choices to your patchouli-smelling ass.

When I got to the hospital, they asked me what I wanted. I said nothing. They said OK.

I dilated to 5cm and then stopped dilating for a couple of hours. After that couple of hours, the doctor (who I saw all of twice during this entire hospital stay) came in and said something like, "You're not dilating any more, so we might want to start Medicine X (I can't remember) to get you going again." And I said, "It's only been a couple of hours. If I'm still at 5cm in 10 hours, we'll talk again." And she said, "OK," and left.

Pitocin was suggested at one point, and I said no, and it wasn't suggested again.

The way this documentary paints it, if you go to a hospital you're basically going to get held down and jammed full of Pitocin, given an epidural, and then given a C-section, whether you want it or not. And that's bullshit.

My insurance doesn't cover midwives in Utah (it does in some other states, but not here). If it did, I would have gone to a midwife. I wouldn't have done a home birth because I live in an apartment and I didn't want to be terrifying my neighbors. I was more comfortable going to a hospital because of that one in a million chance that something went wrong. I was probably as low-risk as you coud get, but I'm paranoid, and I didn't want to be at home and have something terrible happen and lose Camille. That would have been just about the worst thing imaginable.

Am I against home birth? Not at all. I think if you can do a home birth, you should. If you can use a midwife, you should. If you want to use a doctor, you should. Birth is personal. Don't let anyone else tell you how to do it. Tell them you want to do it like this, and if they think otherwise, they can get the fuck out.

I do have something against inductions, and it's because current research shows that labor is begun by the fetus. So if you're not in labor yet, it's because your baby isn't ready yet. And do you really want to give birth to a baby who isn't ready to be born yet? The answer is no.