Let's talk about childbirth.
It's hopefully the last time you touched your mom's vagina.
And I learned about childbirth firsthand
because I recently had a baby.
[cheering]
I don't know.
She was right here.
I don't know.
You can't have it all, can you?
Now, I chose to have a home birth because I
wanted to ruin my couch.
And it turns out, I was pretty lucky
because whenever I talk to a woman who
has given birth in a hospital, it's
almost always a horror story.
The labor was painful.
The doctors were rude.
The nurse pooped on the table and blamed it on me.
But there's a reason why hospital childbirth leads
to all these horror stories.
And it's something I want to talk about.
So lay back and put your feet in the stirrups for tonight's
Long Story Short.
Childbirth is the number one reason why people
go to the hospital in the US.
It sends more Americans to the hospital
than allergic reactions and I don't know
how this got stuck in my butt.
That's a light bulb, just so you know.
And every year, the health care system makes $50 billion
from childbirth.
And, yeah, half of that is just from Nick Cannon,
but it's still a booming industry.
And why is childbirth so expensive?
Because like everything in America,
health care is a business.
And hospitals look at our uterus like it's an ATM.
Delivering moms are increasingly
being charged sky high prices for absolutely
every service or supply provided to them and the baby.
And those bills aren't just high.
In many cases, they're bloated.
Every time you walk into the hospital,
they look at everything that happens to you and say,
can I bill for that?
It's because they can.
They can charge more.
Nobody's asking questions.
And so they do.
And they get away with it.
REPORTER: Dr. Marguerite Duane delivered naturally
just 12 minutes after arriving at the hospital
and only stayed one night.
I noticed that I had been charged
for two hospital nights.
I was charged for medications I didn't receive,
such as oxytocin, $958 for his nursery stay.
And he didn't spend one minute in the nursery?
And he didn't spend one minute in the nursery.
REPORTER: One woman says she was charged $400 for Motrin
and a stool softener.
$400 for a stool softener.
What is this?
A hotel minibar?
If you don't have stool softener
in your hotel minibar, you got to go to a better hotel.
And all that money doesn't even equal better care.
Because like I said, health care is a business.
And a business wants to be efficient.
But childbirth isn't efficient.
Labor could happen at any moment
or it could take over 18 hours.
It's kind of like orgasms.
Is this going to be a quickie or is someone leaving
here with carpal tunnel?
Nobody knows.
Childbirth is messy and unique and complicated.
And it needs the mother to walk around
and stretch and bounce on a yoga ball
and go to the bathroom.
Because maybe you're going to take a dump or maybe that's
where you're going to have the baby.
I'm serious, that happens a lot.
And it's beautiful.
But the hospital would rather have
us laying down with sensors attached to our bodies.
Because it's more efficient to monitor all of it
at once from a computer screen, even
though screens should be for raising our children,
not birthing them.
So here's what happens.
Now you're lying in a bed and your labor slows down
so the hospital speeds up the process
by pressuring you to take the drugs that induce labor.
Even though those drugs affect the heart rate of your baby
and increase your pain.
So then they suggest an epidural
where they jam a needle of fentanyl
into your spine to numb your lower body.
But now you can't feel your lower
body, which means you can't help
push through the contractions.
And now you're slowing down your labor again.
Your baby's heartbeat is going up and down.
It's like a little rave inside of your uterus.
And the doctor comes in saying, you're not progressing enough.
The baby's heartbeat is erratic.
All the shit we made you do has made everything worse.
Why would you make us do all that shit to you?
And that brings us to the biggest medical intervention
of all, C-sections.
Americans have them at an alarmingly high rate.
And it doesn't always have to do with the health
of the mother or the baby.
REPORTER: An alarming number, 1 in 3
women giving birth in America today having a C-section.
But, too often, C-sections are not needed.
REPORTER: Sometimes, doctors or hospitals may rush a C-section
simply because they think labor has gone on long enough
or because the maternity ward is especially busy.
REPORTER: Another reason for the major increase?
Just for the sake of convenience.
Doctors are rushed.
I mean, when someone's giving birth vaginally ,
it can take a long time.
They're in labor.
It can take days.
C-section, very quick, you're in and you're out.
C-sections are a major surgery and they carry
all the risks of surgeries.
REPORTER: If you have a C-section, in 2018,
you have a 90% chance of having a C-section the second time.
But the second time, it's a more complicated surgery.
And the third time, it can be like operating
on a melted box of crayons.
Melted box of crayons?
Jesus.
What happens the fourth time?
We don't even need to do surgery,
it just pops out like an alien.
And C-sections aren't just risky for the mother.
They're also risky for the baby.
Children born via C-sections are four times more likely
to develop breathing problems.
And if my kid is going to have trouble breathing,
I want it to be because I raised a douchebag who vapes.
Is that cotton candy?
There's got to be a better way to do this.
And thankfully, there is.
And it's not some newfangled Silicon Valley birthing pod.
It's one of the oldest childbirth technologies
there is, midwives.
A midwife is a clinician who helps
you either birth inside of a hospital
or outside of a hospital.
And for women with uncomplicated pregnancies,
midwives are a great idea, mostly because they don't do
unnecessary interventions and they're
all about patient autonomy.
Can you imagine that?
Woman having autonomy?
Not in my America.
Let's go Brandon.
In fact, midwives used to be the norm in delivery
until they got pushed out in favor of male doctors.
In the early 1900s, physicians
went on a very effective smear campaign against midwives.
They would make posters showing a Black granny midwife
in a very poor home delivering a baby and saying,
would you want this kind of person to deliver your baby?
REPORTER: Joseph DeLee of Chicago
called midwives relics of barbarism.
To me, it appears brutal, midwifery, not obstetrics.
It is not the forceps, but it is the man behind the forceps
that counts.
The man behind the forceps is what counts?
No, you idiot, we don't need you, your forceps,
your racism, or that weird landing strip goatee
you've got going on.
But that's really the point I want to make here.
The hospital doesn't just emphasize
efficiency and speed over the mother's health and comfort.
It emphasizes the doctor's role over the mother's,
particularly when obstetrics was being created by men.
And it's such a male thing to think that pulling the baby
out is the entirety of labor when
all mothers know that's the easiest
part of the whole thing.
It's like pulling a piece of toast out of the toaster
and saying, I'm the toaster.
So long story short, for women thinking about having a child,
know and understand what your options are and what--
and that this is your birth--
not the hospitals and not the doctor's.
And, look, don't get me wrong.
There are pregnancies that need medical interventions.
But when the hospital needs don't align with yours,
remember, you have choices.
Just because you're in a hospital
doesn't mean you're sick.
Childbirth isn't a disease.
It's powerful and natural.
And we should give women the chance to experience that.
And as a side benefit, it'll free
up all the hospital to figure out how this got up my butt.