Event

Birth Story

Sponsored by: Northern Sun Family Health Care, Milestone Family Wellness Center, and Mama Love Yoga.

BIRTH STORY: INA MAY GASKIN AND THE FARM MIDWIVES tells the story of counterculture heroine Ina May Gaskin and her spirited friends, who began delivering each others babies in 1970, on a caravan of hippie school buses, headed to a patch of rural Tennessee land. With Ina May as their leader, the women taught themselves midwifery from the ground up, and became an integral part of a new, entirely communal, agricultural society called The Farm. The people of the Farm grew their own food, built their own houses, published their own books, and, as word of their social experiment spread, created a model of care for women and babies that changed a generations approach to childbirth. Forty years ago Ina May led the charge away from isolated hospital birthing rooms, where husbands were not allowed and mandatory forceps deliveries were the norm. Today, as nearly one third of all US babies are born via C-section, she fights to preserve her community's hard-won knowledge. With incredible access to the midwives' archival video collection, the film not only captures the unique sisterhood at The Farm Clinic, from its heyday into the present, but shows childbirth the way most people have never seen it--unadorned, unabashed, and awe-inspiring.

BIRTH STORY premiered in Los Angeles at the 2012 LA Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and in New York, at the DOC NYC Film Festival.

" A disarming example of documentary filmmaking that stakes out an opinion with plain-spoken, commonsensical wisdom" (Variety, Aug 6, 2012)

"a granola ode to natural childbirth that makes you want to hop into a tub of warm water and start pushing." (New York Times, Jan 15, 2013)

" A fascinating history lesson and a raucous celebration of lifeyou'll shed tears of joy at the sight of babies being born with a sense of wonder, awe, and joy." (KCRW)