Watching this documentary reminds me of the great posts on Reality Rounds about avoiding the realities of prematurity. Here is a documentary that does NOT avoid them, and highlights the problems not only of early premature birth but also late-term prematurity, and the health disparities in preterm birth in this country.
It's called "Born Too Soon" and is a collaboration between March of Dimes and Kentucky Educational Television. Most of the officials interviewed are from Kentucky, and there's a focus on the rising prematurity rate in Kentucky, but it's generalizable across the country and everything that's happening there is happening around the country. I also love the doula interview, and highlighting the CenteringPregnancy model of care. I think it's an accessible, good overview of the prematurity problem (although let me just insert a little "ack!" here for the baby bottle imagery used. I am of course not a fan of coding "baby" as "bottle".)
You can watch the whole documentary here.
Thanks for posting this - I finally got around to watching it last night and this morning and really enjoyed it. It is so much easier - intellectually and emotionally - to think about problems of poverty, pre-term birth, lack of access, smoking in pregancy, and so on, in the abstract. So I think it's good every once in a while to see the people behind the statistics. And it's helpful to be reminded of what the priorities are in maternal care.
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