Birthing Babies the Natural Way, Subject of Documentary Showing in Cupertino

The documentary Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives, which opens at BlueLight Cinemas in Cupertino on March 8 pulls back the curtain on the mystery, magic, awe and privacy of birthing babies, not to be shocking, but to help tell the story about a movement and return to natural childbirth.

Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a film just for women though.

“It’s something we all have in common, we were all born,” says co-director Sara Lamm.

Lamm and co-director Mary Wigmore were drawn to the story of Gaskin and the Farm Midwives around whom the film is based, after both women read Gaskin’s first book Spirtual Midwifery, which is about natural childbirth.

Now in it’s fourth edition, it’s one of those books that gets passed around and talked about over and over. When Lamm was pregnant she got the book from a friend, “It’s the only book you need to read,” she was told. Lamm paid it forward and passed on the book to Wigmore with the same message.

Gaskin, a renowned midwife, is the founder and director of The Farm Midwifery Center in Tennessee. She and the others at the Farm are no strangers to attention brought to them because of their counter-culture lifestyle and practice of natural childbirth. Media attention was high in the early 70s when the group left San Francisco and journeyed to Tennessee in a caravan of busses to live in an intentional community. Footage appears in Birth Story of Walter Cronkite, a map behind him showing the route they took across the country, as he talks about the 300 hippies moving to Tennessee and being welcomed there.

That footage is nothing in comparison to the “treasure trove of archival footage” from the Farm that the directors were unaware of when they first started the project, Wigmore says.

No other documentary has been made of Gaskin and the Farm, the pair say, but it’s not for lack of trying. Other filmmakers approached Gaskin over the years but it never felt right. Perhaps it was because Lamm and Wigmore are women who have given birth with the assistance of a midwife; the directors don’t know for sure, all they know is that spending time on the Farm with the “wise” women there, and with Gaskin herself, was life changing.

Lamm says someone told her, “’You know you’re supposed to feel changed.’ It exists. It really echoed in my brain. I felt like there was a lot of truth to it.”

Woven throughout the film is the message to encourage women to question why, or if, they really need a Cesarean section, a surgery that has seen a dramatic rise over the last 15 or so years. The rate of C-sections in the U.S. increased 53 percent from 1997 to 2007, accounting for more than a third of all births. In the years between 2000 and 2011 the rates increased 47 percent, according to the CDC.

Conversely the rate of Farm Midwifery births that end up in C-sections is less than two percent.

The film and the directors don’t try to speculate the reason for the rise, but both hope Gaskin’s message and their film give women more knowledge and power to choose.

“Ina May’s work is so helpful to women, her message is helpful to women,” Lamm says.

Actual birth scenes in the film are mesmerizing and Wigmore says they always planned to include them in the film, no matter any potential criticism. Straying from the word “graphic” because it has negative and violent connotations—and birth should not be connected with that—they reach into their synonym bag and pull out “frank”, “unabashed”, and “direct”. Yes, it is all that, and more.

“There’s a lot of inspiration in these positive birth stories,” Wigmore says.

Rowen Holland, a local midwife and the head of Bay Area Birth Information, will be having a special panel discussion following screenings at BlueLight on March 10 at 2 p.m. and on March 14 at 7 p.m.

Visit www.bluelightcinemas.com for all the showings.