Mattress ad depicting home birth makes me joyful
You know, it's not often that a commercial makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. The tagline: "Tu cama. El lugar mas importante del mundo." ("Your bed. The most important place in the world.")
Read a translation and transcript here.
Via Radical Doula and Birth Activist.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Mattress ad depicting home birth makes me joyful.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/13514
That seriously made me tear up, and I NEVER cry. : )
Reminds me when I was 4 and my mother gave birth to my little sister at home. Honestly, I was non-plussed about the whole thing at the time. Of course later I learned that my little sister was 12+ pounds and there was no tearing. Kinda impressive from that view.
Holy crap, how wonderful. How beautiful.
Finally someone breaking that taboo. Childbirth is not an illness and, unless there are complications, does not absolutely need to be in an hospital.
Yeah, that's totally true, but I also see so many people who try to shame women who give birth in hospitals. It's up to her, I think people need to stop shaming people for their decisions.
What's wrong with hospitals? I was born in a hospital. I plan on going to a hospital if I ever have to give birth. They have DRUGS there. Beautiful, pain-numbing drugs.
Some people prefer to give birth at home or in a birth center since more interventions tend to happen in hospitals, and many of them are not done out of true medical necessity, but instead to "speed things along" to an arbitrary timeline, or due to hospital tradition that is not based on evidence (e.g., episiotomy, which except under rare circumstances has no benefits and causes more complications than tearing).
Also, the hospital environment is the total opposite of the conditions that have been proved to make labor progress normally (i.e., privacy, quiet, warmth, dim lights, a feeling of not being observed).
Totally agree that people should have the choice to do it with drugs if that's what they want (and in certain pregnancies with known complications, the hospital is the place to be). But if you want to do it naturally and all is well, it makes sense for many women to steer clear of hospitals.
The reason I want to have my baby born in a hospital (if I ever have a baby) is because if anything is wrong with my child at all I want to be in a place full of doctors. I don't want to be 30 minutes away or 5 minutes away or even 1 minute away. I want to be right there so if anything is wrong there are doctors right there.
Which can also have adverse health consequences for your baby and you. Those drugs can depress baby's heart rate, among other things, and a depressed fetal heart rate is frequently given as a cause for a Caesarean.
Oh my god, that made my day. I’m planning a home birth right now (due at the end of this month!) and any depiction of happy births like this one make me cry like mad.
Best wishes for a safe and easy delivery and healthy baby, Miriam! I birthed both mine at home and I am so glad I did.
that's really sweet
Incredible ad. I would love to see that on cable.
I applaud the mother, the father, and their family for allowing this to be shared with the world. Its beautifully done.
oh...and who is the mattress company again?
Nice for her, as for me :hospital and epidural please.
Right. That's your CHOICE. Many women don't know they have a choice, and that birth is scary and awful. After seeing [i]The Business of being born[/i], I got pretty angry that hospitals and doctors many times take the experience out of the mother's control, and in essence make her feel like she's a bad mom if she doesn't do exactly what they want. Regardless of what birth plan you choose, I think it's a good documentary. It should be the woman's experience, her way. If epidural and hospital is what you want after fully discussing all the options, then more power to you. It's YOUR birthing experience. No one can judge until they are in that position.
I have to main concerns that inform my choice: my severe aversion to pain and the concern something might go wrong. But yeah, it's an individual choice.
That was lovely. And of course it's a foreign ad. Can you imagine something like this being done here in the US?
It's so refreshing to how other countries can depict nudity, childbirth, and the female body as something natural and wholesome, while here people just get so squeamish about it, like it's a dirty secret.
this ad makes me realize how far behind i personally and u.s. culture in general are concerning attitudes about childbirth. i am 20, and this is only the second time i have ever seen a real birth (albeit on film) in my life. a day-time mattress commercial can deal with the topic in a sensitive, respectful, and rather nonplussed way, yet it's taken me until college anatomy to see a real-life birth. sheesh.
Its so important to start as early as you can de-conditioning yourself from most all of the childbirth images you have been given as a member of American society. I'm at the point now where I will not watch almost any tv show or movie about birth, because the image of a screaming woman with tubes and a hospital gown laying on a table is just so hurtful to me. It does not have to be that way! That is a construction of birth that we need to fight against. So glad other version of birth are now circulating.
so, so, so awesome.
Thank you for posting this!
I reposted on my FB page and considered a "contains childbirth scene" warning...but reconsidered. Hoping lots of people watch it!
Oh, what crap. I just tried to check on my link and found that Youtube users have "flagged" it as inappropriate for some users. You have to be 18 to watch.
Grr.
I always find it so far beyond all possible logic that we can watch all manner of violence and sex in movies and tv shows, but that people get grossed out over things like breast feeding and childbirth.
This confuses me also.
So that's what childbirth looks like. Wow...just wow. It's other-worldly. Not in a derogatory sense, mind you, but in an awe-inspiring sense. What a wonderful commercial.
I loved this commercial!
Except now instead of wanting to buy a mattress, it made me really want to have a baby.
That was the most beautiful commercial I've ever seen!!!
Totally unrelated, but did anyone else notice that the music was oddly similar to the Eternal Sunshine theme?
What a difference between what you can see on Spanish TV and American TV... Can you imagine the hysteria if someone showed this on TV in the US?
Really beautifully done. Makes me look forward to my next [birth center] birth!
Sorry, it still looked like a painful, unpleasant process.
Why would any woman want to show anything so intimate and personal to the world???
To prove that it can be beautiful, natural, safe and not full of screaming.
That was awesome. The birthing process still seems horrifying and disturbing to me (but that's neither here nor there) the fact remains that they
1) didn't show homebirth in a negative light for a change
2) I didn't read the translation BUT I liked the way that everyone was involved, mum, dad, child and midwife (?)
3) I LOVED the way they didn't cover up the "nasty bits" like you seem to always get on T.V - it shits me to tears when you see a womyn giving birth on TV and they're all covered up and the obstetrician (or equiv, I'm not too sure) hiding underneath this mass of covers so as not to see a dreaded vagina
C'est magnifique.
I should also probably add that me using phrases like "dreaded vagina" and "nasty bits" are also entirely sarcastic because you can't always tell tone on the internetz :)
They cover up the "nasty bits" so the woman giving birth can still maintain a modicum of modesty. I sure wouldn't want to expose myself to the whole hospital, let alone a TV audience!
Well, that's you. This woman felt that her childbirth was a process she could go through without shame or concern over her body's state of undress.
I think "intimate and personal" are mostly self-defined.
No, I'm pretty positive that in America the reason that area is not shown on tv is that the FCC would throw a hissy fit and fine people for thousands of dollars for subjecting our precious virgin eyes to such horrid pornography!
Now, if they ever loosened up and realized that childbirth is natural and not disgusting and needing to be blurred out I'm sure some women (if it was a documentary-type program we're talking about) would choose to have it blurred still for privacy purposes.
I like this idea for a mattress commercial, but I never actually want to see it. Childbirth freaks me out. I really hope that there will be more advancements in science to allow women more options as far as having (biological) children.
Love this ad. I am Spaniard, and it is true that in Europe the female body is treated in a less puritan way, and when it comes to maternity, it is often treated with kindness and tenderness.
Here I leave a link to another ad of baby formula, you can see at the end a nice scene of a woman breastfeeding.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41v8omm0XIU
I just realized this is the first time I've seen a video of childbirth where the woman isn't screaming her head off. I never seen a childbirth where the mother holds onto the infant while birthing either. o_o
I also just realized how fucked American culture can sometimes be. The way we portray childbirth... or don't even show it, is kind of awful. I'm 19, btw.
Yeah, they'd never show a commercial like this in the states. They'd say it's too graphic and inappropriate for younger viewers. ..Not that I agree.
For example, girls in India which force to prostitution, usually are on sale the poor families considering the child-girl as a hindrance, or these girls aspired to avoid a compulsory marriage. In New York the majority of girls which have forced to prostitution, are teenagers-fugitives who were victims of sexual or physical violence of the house and for whom there is no work, services or safe habitation. In southeast Asia many women face the limited economic choice of the rural poor - to work on assembly lines where pay a little, sight spoils and often dismiss workers is more senior 30, or to work in "show business".
The national economy often starts to depend on prostitution because of demand in the American public houses in wars. When these inquiries have decreased, prostitution has gone to a sex tourism channel - the organised miltimillionno-dollar transnational business on regular sale of female bodies as parts of the rounds, feeding numerous intermediaries and bringing the foreign capital the city of New York. In all these situations the patriarchal confidence, that at men is the rights to female bodies, and that "other" races or the "lowest" classes are not people, underlies violence to which subject women.