Ricki Lake's "awesome" vagina

The actress and former talk show host takes us on a magical mystery tour through natural childbirth in her new documentary.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected since it was first published.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Childbirth, Rebecca Traister, Life, Tribeca Film Festival

May 4, 2007 | It's a buoyant spring afternoon, and in a comfortable hotel lobby in Manhattan, actress and former talk show host Ricki Lake is talking episiotomies. "I pushed two and a half hours with my first son, and both my midwife and doctor wanted to cut me, and my doula said, 'Please just give her a little more time,'" Lake is saying, when her friend, director Abby Epstein, cuts in. "And at that point, were you like, 'OK, I'm going to push this puppy out?" Lake nods in grinning affirmation that she had indeed pushed out that puppy, now known as 10-year-old Milo. "And all I needed was two superficial stitches!"

It might sound like too much information, but that disclosure is nothing for those who have already caught a screening of "The Business of Being Born," the documentary about midwifery and home birth that had premiered the night before this conversation at the Tribeca Film Festival. Epstein, who directed the movie, and Lake, who executive-produced it, have included vivid footage of their own labors and deliveries in the project, along with those of several other mothers.

It's the 2001 birth of Lake's second son, Owen, in the bathtub in her apartment, that appears in the movie and has already garnered the film gossip column ink. "On the Internet they've already said, 'Ricki Lake gives birth naked ... Ew, I want to vomit,' or 'I think I just threw up a little in my mouth,'" Lake reported laughingly, as she described her own terror at watching the scene on the big screen the night before.

Indeed, if these predictable online cruelties do not seem to be fazing a newly svelte 38-year-old Lake, who has battled her weight publicly for most of the 20 years since being cast as overweight teenager Tracy Turnblad in "Hairspray," she would like to credit the blessed event that is the centerpiece of her new movie.

"That birth was very healing," Lake said, "both from the standpoint of having been sexually abused as a young girl," -- an event she has recently begun to discuss publicly -- "but also having body issues my whole life and being obese for such a long time. I made peace with my body that day. I was able to pat myself on the back and say, 'OK, so I got stretch marks!' But what an amazing and significant thing my body was able to do!"

Fat jokes, she claims, were the least of her concerns. "I was trepidatious about putting my footage in the film," she said. "I don't want to seem like I'm exploiting it. But I felt like it was necessary." Epstein added, "In the beginning when we were trying to get funding, Ricki putting her footage in there raised the ante. For her to expose herself this way, it confirmed this isn't some celebrity vanity project -- quite the opposite! This isn't Angelina Jolie traipsing through Kenya with an economist."

No. "The Business of Being Born" is most definitely not Angelina Jolie traipsing through Kenya with an economist. It's a magical mystery tour of bodily fluids, sliced uteri, gloppy infants and gaping vaginas. I watched it at a press screening seated across the aisle from Lake's mentor, venerable transgressor John Waters. Waters appeared calm if slightly faint as baby after baby was sloppily disgorged, and had guffawed appreciatively during the discussion of the demand for elective C-sections for those "too posh to push." "I said to John after the screening that I bet that was the most vaginas he's ever seen in his life!" said Lake.

But for all the anatomical infelicities of human reproduction, "The Business of Being Born" includes very little of the screaming, gnashing, clenching horror that is the hallmark of most TLC-style obstetri-drama or, for that matter, of the kind of hirsute birthing filmstrip some progressively educated middle schoolers are shown in sex ed. Instead, Lake and Epstein have made a movie about the pleasures and political importance of natural, midwife-assisted home birth.

The film examines the grim history of childbirth practices in the United States, from the scary twilight sleep of the early 20th century to the newer chemical and surgical interventions. Their take is that as childbirth has become a technologically advanced business, and moved from homes to hospitals, the power and innate wisdom of laboring women (and their midwives) have been sapped by a medical establishment that thinks it knows better. It's not new. Adrienne Rich wrote "Of Woman Born" in 1976; Nancy Chodorow published "The Reproduction of Motherhood" two years later. But like so much learned feminism, the politics of motherhood seem destined to be ghettoized, forgotten and rediscovered again, over and over, until one day, perhaps, they sink in.

In "The Business of Being Born," the unhappy women are those in hospitals, their deliveries sped up and often mangled by drugs that numb them, that make their babies come fast and hard, and that necessitate emergency surgical deliveries with increasing frequency. Epstein's cameras catch maternity wards in which every laboring mother is being induced, in which women are shamed into pushing harder and threatened with C-sections if they don't. She interviews experienced doctors who have never witnessed a natural home birth, though they instinctively reject the notion.

It's not as though the half-dozen home-birth mothers in "The Business of Being Born" are gently expelling pink babies onto bushels of cornflowers. But the experience sure does look a hell of a lot happier through Epstein's lens.

Women in the midwife-assisted births are shown walking around their apartments. They wiggle their hips and squat and groan and bend over and sweat and curse and finally reach between their own legs, often while lying in bathtubs or birthing pools, and pick up the schmutz-covered infants who have just sploshed from their bodies, holding them to their bellies and bare breasts with surprising serenity.

Epstein and Lake met, they said rather poetically, "through vaginas"; Epstein directed Lake in an off-Broadway production of "The Vagina Monologues" in 2000, and they collaborated again for V-Day in 2001, when Lake was carrying Owen and feeling very exuberant about her lady parts. "I was about six months pregnant and I was like, 'My vagina's awesome!'" she said. The women became friends, and Lake told Epstein about her home-birth plans.

Next page: She had thought of midwives as "crunchy, granola, brown rice people"