A film about giving birth in the United States? Don’t we have much bigger issues right now?
Bigger than the fact that in a country with the most expensive healthcare in the world, our maternal MORTALITY rate has RISEN 30 percent in the last 15 years? Maybe? But Born Free is about so much more than "just” why we have the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world.
It’s about investigating what it is like to have a baby in modern day America. Asking questions like why do so many women experience PTSD after birth? Emergency Surgery? Anxiety issues? Or Bankruptcy?
If birth and pregnancy are our lens on how a society values its women. Why is it a fight that women in the US are losing more often and not less, a fight birthing people have to undertake when feeling our most vulnerable.
A fight that has statistically awful outcomes for women of color. A fight against a lack of informed choice, against medical overreach and sometimes abuse. A fight for bodily autonomy, against systemic racism, sexism, poverty, and big pharma. Potentially even a fight for our lives.
An unexpected journey of discovery from first time director Paula James-Martinez, created with an all female crew, Born Free wants to hand women the tools to start to finally be able to roar for themselves.
