All Things Supercinski

I had been itching to see Ricki Lake’s documentary, The Business of Being Born, ever since I heard about it months ago, and I finally had a chance to watch it last week. The Women’s Studies department at TAMU was holding a screening, and thankfully, my midwife was telling everyone she knew to come. I highly recommend the film to anyone who is pregnant or thinking about having children anytime soon.

The documentary makes an excellent case for natural childbirth, and a very strong case for giving birth outside of the hospital. With the United States spending more money delivering babies than any other country, but with an infant mortality rate the second worst in the developed world (and a maternal mortality rate that is one of the worst in the developed world), something needs to change. The documentary sites several reasons–the absence of midwives from hospitals, the rising cesarean rate, artificial time limits put on the natural process of birth, insurance/money and more. The film offers a lot of statistics, history, and political explanations for current birth practices that leave little confidence in the current system (especially the historical parts).

Several home births are documented in the film, including Ricki Lake’s own birth. There is quite a bit of nudity, but less than the average birthing video, and much less than the films I show in my classes! These births show the pain, excitement and freedom of birth without hospital restrictions and policies. The film takes an unexpected turn with director Abby Epstein’s pregnancy and birth offering balance as to the role of hospitals and doctors when serious complications arise.

While unmedicated childbirth is a truly miraculous event, and one that I highly recommend experiencing, I tend to disagree with the film’s underlying message that natural birth is the culmination of your existence as a woman. I do believe that, in the majority of cases, God made our bodies fully capable of giving birth without modern technology assisting, though it definitely has a place, as the film shows through Epstein’s birth. Our blind trust and dependence upon surgeons to “treat” the normal has led us to forsake education, preparation, and determination in the natural process. I fully recommend The Business of Being Born. You will be challenged to (re)consider your views on birth. The film is currently available through private screenings and Netflix.

We Supercinskis have been serious readers this summer, and I have read so many great books that I want to recommend them to you, our faithful readers.

Finished
A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. This is one of the most painful memoirs I have ever read. It is about a twelve-year-old boy forced into war where he witnessed and participated in some of the most horrible violence imaginable, but he tells his story honestly and without self-pitying.

Same Kind of Different as Me: A modern day slave, an international art dealer, and the unlikely woman who bound them together by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. I read most of this book this afternoon, and I am thinking about reading it again. My review doesn’t do it justice, so just read this one. Really, I can’t recommend it enough–go get it!

Stepping Heavenward by Elisabeth Prentiss. As Elisabeth Eliot says on the back cover of my book, I recommend this book “to any woman who wants to walk with God.” Not that it is that necessary, but I found it, though fiction, to be such an encouragement to me in growing in Christlikeness.

Currently Reading
Don’t Make Me Count to Three: A Mom’s Look at Heart-Oriented Discipline by Ginger Plowman. Her book is a wonderful compliment to Shepherding a Child’s Heart, but more on the practical side. She offers many suggestions of the “how” to reprove which I have found to be very helpful.

What Jesus Demands from the World by John Piper. I just started this one after getting it for only $2.50–what a deal! I am excited to read more.

Real Food by Nina Plack. Another that I just started, which is similar to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of our favorite food culture books. Another book I can’t wait to get into!

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf. This was loaned to us by a friend, who was right on the money in thinking that we would like it. It is a wonderful reminder of why we are told to lay up our treasures in heaven, when the world around us (and our minds) are always wanting to acquire more on earth.

Do you have any recommendations you want to share?

“Curiously, Justus von Liebig, the nineteenth-century German chemist with the spectacularly ironic surname, bears responsibility for science’s overly reductive understanding of both ends of the food chain. It was Liebig, you’ll recall, who thought he had found the chemical key to soil fertility with the discovery of NPK, and it was the same Liebig who thought he had found the key to human nutrition when he identified the macronutrients in food. Liebig wasn’t wrong on either count, yet in both instances he made the fatal mistake of thinking that what we knew about nourishing plants and people was all we needed to know to keep healthy. It’s a mistake we’ll probably keep repeating until we develop a deeper respect for the complexity of food and soil and, perhaps, the links between the two.” The Omnivore’s Dilemna, pg. 180

Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemna after buying an ‘industrial organic’ meal:
“I very much like the fact that the milk in the ice cream I served came from cows that did not receive injections of growth hormone to boost their productivity, or that the corn those cows are fed, like the corn that feeds Rosie [a chicken], contains no residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. Exposure to vanishingly small amounts (0.1 part per billion) of this herbicide has been shown to turn normal male frogs into hermaphrodites. Frogs are not boys, of course. So I can wait for that science to be done, or for our government to ban atrazine (as European governments have done), or I can act now on the presumption that food from which this chemical is absent is better for my son’s health than food that contains it.” The Omnivore’s Dilemna pg. 178

“The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants make them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.” [emphasis mine] The Omnivore’s Dilemna pg. 147-148

‘So what exactly would an ecological detective set loose in an American supermarket discover, were he to trace the items in his shopping cart all the way back to the soil? The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, I realized that the straightforward question “What should I eat?” could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: “What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?” Not very long ago an eater

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“Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature’s ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system — a patch of soil, a human body — and the health of one is connected — literally — to the health of the other. Many of the problems of health and nutrition we face today trace back to things that happen on the farm, and behind those things stand specific government policies few of us know anything about.” The Omnivore’s Dilemna Introduction, pg. 9