Giving birth doesn't have to be, nor should it be, a contest about who feels better about themselves, or more at one with their bodies. Nor should it entail the most dastardly implication of home-birth enthusiasts, that the at-home mother is somehow more naturally attuned to and prepared for parenthood, or more readily prepared and able to bond with her child.

I totally hear you. But i think your post here is a little short-sighted at best and a little disingenuous at worst. Maybe you run in different circles than I do, but what I hear (and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area) from the vast majority of people when I tell them that when I have kids I plan to do so at home is that I am "irresponsible" and "endangering" my baby. I generally ask them to watch BOBB (thanks for the acronym!) before I'll go into it too far with them.

The thing is, what I think BOBB set out to do is address one of the real problems in this country, which is the commodification of labor and delivery. We have a skyrocketing C-section rate and not much good to show for it. Besides, I think the film did a good job of saying that C-sections are good and we should be thankful for them - when they're necessary. But most of the time they're not necessary, and that's the problem. Hospitals are using them to be more profitable at the expense of mothers. Quite literally.

I've been a birth partner for two births and am about to be for a third. These women are my closest friends. Both of them birthed in hospitals - one at UCSF and one at a catholic hospital in the South Bay. The UCSF birth was pretty amazing, and aside from one nurse that would not listen to any of us (including the mother), and an anesthesiologist who took so long to show up that she was pushing by the time he decided to set up the epidural, it went pretty well. If anything they tended to err on the side of less intervention, not more.

The one at the Catholic hospital, however, was pretty much a nightmare. She was always going to deliver at hospital because of her medical history, but her pregnancy had been a healthy one. The nurses (all but one) were hostile and extremely rude, didn't explain what they were doing and just poked and prodded and were very invasive, and when we politely asked questions or asked them to explain what they were doing (this was her first pregnancy and they knew that), they just said it was procedure and that was that. When one of them was tired of the baby moving around and having to move the external monitor, she lied to us about an issue with the baby's heartbeat, and tried to pressure and guilt my friend into having an internal monitor - something we vociferously opposed. The nurse tried to get her non-family birth partners, including me, kicked out at every turn after that. Instead we requested a change of staff, which the hospital grudgingly obliged.

My friend ended up having many, many interventions over the course of her time there, and eventually had to deliver by C-section, and afterward was forced to be in a cold room by herself to recover, not able to have the people she'd chosen as her birth support there to hold her hand through it. They threatened to kick us out if we dared enter her recovery room to keep her company, simply because we weren't blood relations. It was awful. But SHE was amazing, and her kid is amazing, and that's what we told her all the way through.

My point is just that this film has, I think, made it easier for women to think about what they really want. My friend who had a c-section is expecting another child any day, and her decision to have a vaginal birth was extremely controversial - her doctor tried to force her into a c-section, using guilt and other tactics. But she held firm and is using a midwife at a local hospital so there is easy medical backup if she needs emergency intervention.

And my other point is that it's not just mothers and midwives who are saying that this kind of delivery is better, but the guilt definitely and I'd say overwhelmingly goes in the other direction - I constantly hear that home birthing is "irresponsible" and "dangerous," when it is actually nothing of the kind. It's not right for everyone, but it is a valid choice. Midwives AND nurses AND doctors should be in the practice of listening to their patients and helping mothers listen to their own bodies, whatever the situation may be, and whether medical intervention is required or not.