Best Birth Videos

I'm not a medical expert, midwife, doula, childbirth educator, or childbirth activist. I am the mother of two little girls, proud and happy about my drug-free hospital births, which took place with my husband in a quiet hospital birthing room with what I consider to be minimal and bearable interventions: the donning of a hospital gown; intermittent fetal monitoring; and, in labor, a heparin lock to keep a vein open, in case I needed an IV line (I didn't).

I'm also lucky. Not all hospitals are as flexible as the one in which I gave birth. Not all women live in a community where working with a midwife or a birth center are possibilities, and where parenting resource centers (with book and video libraries, educational workshops, and so on) are readily available. I didn't have a midwife or doula present at either birth, but I could have. As a woman with low-risk pregnancies in a major city in California, I had choices and resources. Some women don't. And some women who have them choose to decline them. Why choices for birthing naturally are nonexistent or rejected is the subject of much debate"hand many a childbirth video, some of which are reviewed here. Note that these are not the latest releases, but rather ones that have been recommended as informative and provocative by several childbirth experts. With a nudge or a push, most of these films help to move us away from the prevalent perception of birth as a medical procedure, and closer to the understanding that birth can be a natural and less complicated process--no matter where you choose to deliver. They have been suggested not because there is only one "true" way to give birth, but because there is more than one way to approach a birth.

Birth Day
Filmed by Frank Ferrel and Georges Vinaver. Produced by Sage Femme, Inc., 1999. 11 min. $29.95. www.homebirthvideos.com

"Every time I've been very proud and excited about something in my life, I've wanted to share it with my family." So begins Birth Day, a brief documentary about one family's experience with childbirth. Naoli Vinaver Lopez, a mesmerizing and articulate midwife and mother, shares with us the labor and delivery of her third child, Tamaya. "The day of the birth, to me, couldn't have been without my family" Naoli observes. "It felt as if it was an event that we all had to share together. like a picnic, like a birthday party. We see Naoli and her family as they go through the day of the birth at home in Veracruz, Mexico, hiking, sharing a meal as Naoli goes through contractions, and finally watching Naoli in active labor in the family tub.

In one of the film's many indelible moments, Naoli and her husband, Hiroyuki, walk back and forth together, holding each other's arms in a sort of labor dance. The tenderness captured by filmmaker George Vinaver, Naoli's father, is striking, and becomes even more so as we hear Naoli's recollection of the events that led up to it. Whenever she walks, in labor, toward Hiroyuki (she tells us in voiceover), she feels their love "swollen" in her belly, and envisions her contractions as the sun wanting to burst out of her body. But as she walks away from Hiroyuki, the contractions become more painful. When Hiroyuki hears this, they begin their dance, in an effort to make labor feel only "like love bursting out, and not so much like pain.

Birth Day quietly demonstrates that birthing without intervention is not only possible but can also be profoundly beautiful and safe. Naoli gives every woman hope when she says, "If you just give them the space, [women giving birth] will know exactly what to do. Women have insight, the deep knowledge of how to move, exactly when to push. The body who has made this baby knows exactly how to get it out of the body." With their openness and harmony during labor, Naoli and Hiroyuki show us how birthing can remain an intimate experience for a couple, even as it is shared with the whole family. Powerful but not judgmental, Birth Day raises the bar for birth videos and offers expecting families an inspiring image of where birth can take them.

Birth in the Squatting Position
Produced by Polymorph Films in association with MoysA(C)s and Claudio Paciornik, 1979. Updated by the American Academy of Husband-Coached Childbirth, 2002. 10 min. $59.95. AAHCC, 800-4-A-Birth.

Filmed in Brazil more than two decades ago, this extraordinary video shows a string of entirely hands-off natural birth - something so unusual in our culture that it's shocking to see. In all of the births shown, the baby is allowed to make its way out of the birth canal untouched, to land softly on a blanket placed beneath the squatting mother. The few times we do see a pair of gloved hands appear onscreen, they are there only to reach out to catch the baby's head, after the baby's body has flopped toward the nest of fabric below. In each birth, the mother's body is left to its own devices during the final stages of delivery, in silent testimony to a woman's innate knowledge and power in labor. One baby is seen turning its shoulder as it leaves its mother's body, unaided by midwives or doctors' glimpse of the birthing wisdom that babies, too, possess. None of the parents are interviewed, but their faces, tears, and gestures tell us that birth can be as rapturous as it is laborious.