Perhaps you've already heard of this documentary, which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. You're forgiven for not remembering it immediately. You almost certainly heard of it under a different name. One more like, "That movie where Ricki Lake has her baby in a bathtub." Ah, yes! That movie.

Thankfully, all due respect to Ricki, The Business of Being Born does not consist solely of footage of her home birth, uncomfortably riveting as it is. Instead, it convincingly and movingly makes the case for having your baby at home, with a midwife, instead of at a C-section-mad hospital. Risky as that may sound to pregnant women already practicing over-protectiveness, it turns out that America, where only 8 percent of women deliver with a midwife, has a much higher infant and mother mortality rate than almost any other country in the developed world, where midwives deliver 70 percent of babies. For a whole host of reasons—drugs, anxiety, malpractice, and a doctor's desire to get home for dinner—one in three American women had a C-section in 2005, a truly astronomical amount.

Though the cynic in you may pish-posh all this deification of birth—what's the big deal, life with a child is long, and birth's just a minuscule portion of it so shoot me up and get that baby out—watching these women hold their children after excruciating, lengthy, drug-free deliveries, high on love hormones and accomplishment, it's impossible not to believe something valuable and—excuse the granola—sacred is going on in the minutes right after you have a child. Maybe it'd be best if we weren't unconscious or doped up for it by default. As one of the midwives says, after birth you have this feeling, "if I could do that, I could do anything." And, as opposed to all the hyperbolists who claim the same thing after a jarring bungee jump, in this case the sentiment seems to be, well, true.—Willa Paskin

LINKS
• Official Site
• You might also recognize Ricki from...