Birth Video, Leicester
Friday, May 22, 2009 at 1:24AMFor those of you who didn’t get to see the full video of the NHS Leicester Trust’s anti-teen pregnancy campaign, it’s online again.
The video has continually been labelled at “gory” and “graphic.” The only thing graphic about the video is that it shows a human being in pain being humiliated and ogled by others. The staged birth of what appears to be a posterior baby is in itself far from graphic.
As I wrote on Birth Activist, many women experience psychologically and emotionally traumatic births for reasons such as inadequate emotional support, a fearful birth space, a birth space full of strangers or care providers who resort to humiliation or bullying to gain compliance. In other words, the feelings that some women experience in a hospital would mimic the presumed feelings of this teenager giving birth while taunted by schoolmates.
The provocative nature of the campaign is not the big issue for me. I would like to think that we could do right by the next generation of mothers by not perpetuating the inaccurate media meme of childbirth as a terrifying, humiliating and inherently shocking event.
It doesn’t have to be.
Here is what birth CAN be… and is for many women:
Reader Comments (6)
I have never seen that anti-teen pregnancy video. I also do not find it gory or graphic. It makes her birth look like a freak show, which unfortunately some births I've witness have looked like. BTW, I do not think fear campaigns like the above video work in preventing teen pregnancies.
Freak show. THAT'S the perfect way to describe the video.
I agree with you. I think it might at most only affect a handful in the abstinence or protection area, but there's such a distal vs. proximal reward confilct during adolesence. Nine months seems really, really far away for a lot of kids at that developmental stage.
That video wouldn't make me not have sex. I can understand the fear of it, but if I was going to have sex, that video would not stop me from doing so.
And the hypnobirth was amazing. I am training to be a doula, and I have watched tons of births. This is the calmest birth I have ever seen. She was in transition and it looked like she was sleeping.
I wish more people would watch calming births like this one. If they could see that childbirth isn't something to be feared, they would know that it is a natural process and to let their body do its thing.
Hi Kayce,
Sheridan from Enjoy Birth also has a really calm Hypnobabies birth video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA7Y_DnC_kA
It makes me wish I had taken my Hypnobabies home study course more seriously. I was more interested in the fear release mp3's than doing all of the pain canceling techniques. I had a really, really manageable birth which was largely due to relaxation and hypnosis. Then I hit transition and had twenty minutes of !!! And then I was pushing, and that went fast. Silent it was not, though. =) This makes me very interested in hypnosis in general.
Is the teen pregnancy one real?
iloveyou10192@yahoo.com
No, it's staged.