Giving Birth presents what midwifery care is all about:

• Time
• Listening
• Relationship
• Knowing the birthing woman's history and values
• Addressing women's real concerns, fears and doubts
• Helping her trust her body's wisdom
• Providing continuity of care
• Supporting and trusting the natural process
• Protecting the woman's delicate tissues
• Providing for continuity of care
• Protecting the mother-baby relationship

What you WILL see:

• How empowering birth can be for a woman
• What a healthy, full-term newborn looks like who's mother has not had drugs or anesthesia
• What a midwife-style prenatal visit looks/feels like (with a toddler sibling present)
• What true support looks like in labor
• A midwife-attended labor and natural birth (with a middle class couple, in an modern home)
• Active birth: upright, active positions in labor, use of a birthing stool, the mother feeling her baby's head as it emerges and helping draw her baby out and up onto her chest
• Extraordinary joy a woman feels after completing the hard work of
  birth without drugs or anesthesia
• Active father support in labor and during delivery
• Still photos of a water birth

What you will NOT see:

• Full-frontal nudity ~ the birthing woman wears an open silk kimono all during birth
• Vaginal shots ~ because the woman gives birth seated on a modern birthing stool rather than lying on her back
• The typical hospital gowns, IVs, episiotomy, and separation of mother and baby

What you will NOT hear:

• Criticizing hospitals or physicians ~ however, you will hear three obstetricians, a labor and delivery nurse and a doula, including Dr. Christiane Northrup, speaking honestly about the way in which standard contemporary hospital and physician practices are not based upon scientific evidence
• That home birth is best ~ instead, the home is shown as the most normal, natural setting and the place where a woman is most likely to be unhurried or pressured in labor.

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