Recently I watched the film "Pregnant in America." I have to agree with all the netflix reviewers who said that it was somewhat of a B-grade movie, and in many ways inferior to "The Business of Being Born." With that said though, I still recommend it for a couple of reasons:1--it is clean (no language, no nudity...BoBB has quite a bit of both, and while they are in context, they are still bothersome for many viewers).
2--the film features interviews with a broader range of people, ranging from experts to random people on the street.
One quote (played during the credits, so I don't know who said it) was particularly memorable:
We can only change things in two ways: either with litigation, or with education.
Obviously, I'm a proponent of the latter.While this movie does have its flaws (it gets pretty dramatic--in melodramatic way--at the end; and they don't provide references for most of their statistics, so I don't know how precisely factual they are), it's still an effort at education, and for that I must applaud them...at least a little bit.
I liked PiA much better than BoBB. In fact I was extremely disappointed in BoBB after all the hype I heard about it. When I showed it to my sister in hopes of encouraging her to have a homebirth she freaked out. The woman and co-producer of the movie who attempts a homebirth at the end leaves the movie on a terrible note. The whole movie is dedicated to encouraging homebirth but in the end the woman making the movie had a failed homebirth. My sister went on to transfer to the hospital during her attempted homebirth and the fear she had that BoBB induced I think is owed a lot of credit for her transfer. When I watched PiA I was really impressed by the variety of people they interviewed and the detailed one-on-one investigation tactics. I wish that I had showed this movie to my sister when she was pregnant instead of BoBB.
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