Allison Anders on the Empowerment of Natural Childbirth
An Excerpt From "Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors In Their Own Words"
Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. To celebrate the day, here is an excerpt from my conversation with the great filmmaker Allison Anders about her experience with natural childbirth and her mission to depict it correctly on film.
Several of your films tackle aspects of menstruation, pregnancy, and post-pregnancy that you don’t often see on screen. In Grace of My Heart you have the lactation scene and in Sugar Town you have this very romantic kiss during the home birth.
It’s weird how it’s still a little taboo. I had to do one of those hysterical birth scenes, on the Beaches remake and I cringed so hard. I wish I had never done it. I find that birth in particular is something that is so important to me.
I came of age in the 1970s. So, it was important. My mother had had my last sibling, my sister, Dominique, and she had natural childbirth, in the hospital. So, I fully expected, four years later when I had my child, that I was going to do the same, which I did. But then I decided to have my second baby at home.
I was just talking to Joan Baez about this. I told her that I remembered seeing her being interviewed where someone asked her how it was going to feel giving birth to her baby when her husband was in prison. She came right back at him and said she was having a natural childbirth, so she hoped it would feel really good. And I was like, oh, my god, this woman is amazing. That she could say that. Because at the time, it was outrageous to think that giving birth could feel good, because we were told it was terrifying. Which is part of the whole thing about women’s bodies being dirty or disgusting or whatever, so that everything is to be feared. Here was this monumental experience of bonding and creation, and all that we were told was it’s a terrifying thing to get over and to be knocked out for.
This was a very empowered movement, the natural childbirth movement, very empowered. Joan said to me, “I will tell you one thing, it did not feel good. I don’t regret it, but I wouldn’t say it felt good.” I told her that she gave me the power to have that experience. It was a point of empowerment for women. It was a choice that you made to not let doctors put a gas mask on you or to interfere with the bonding process.
Read more insights on motherhood, mother-daughter relationships, and more from Allison Anders in my book Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors In Their Own Words, which is available from Rizzoli and on sale now in bookstores everywhere.
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