Birthing Contrasts

I chose to watch Episode 4: Mama Knows Best of the Liftime television series One Born Every Minute.  In that episode, three married couples all gave birth to girls.  The first couple, Christian and John-Mark, was very different from the couples on the video The Business of Being Born in that the women who chose midwives were not moaning from the pain as much as Christian moaned.  Even after telling the doctor that she had previous bad experiences with epidurals only numbing half of her body, they gave her one anyway so obviously her voice did not matter too much to her doctor.  The second couple, Nicole and Irvine, had a very long 24-hour labor that resulting in the mother being too tired to push and needing a C-section, another example of the doctor going against the mother’s beginning wishes, since Nicole wanted to be able to hold her baby right after birth.  The last couple, Kara and Kyle, had a scheduled appointment, the only male doctor in the whole episode broke her water for her, and then her doctor tried to move Kara’s baby in the birth canal from its posterior position to ease Kara’s labor time.  Each of these labors entailed the women coming into the hospital and getting put in the hospital bed, not walking around like in the movie and only Christian and Kara were complimented by their husbands for being strong.