My Daily Domestic Diigolet 03/02/2008

Lake is also joining forces with Rosie O’Donnell and Gloria Steinem to raise funds for a projected $7 million birthing center in Manhattan. Lake’s passion for her new cause is admirable, but her movie’s gauzy idealization of the home-birth experience may have the opposite effect from the one she intended. Instead of adding to the store of useful information available to pregnant women, it may serve only to calcify the already annoyingly rigid debate between advocates of “natural” childbirth and practitioners of … well, whatever the opposite is.

One interviewee offers a smart critique of cable health shows like Birth Day and A Baby Story, which concentrate on emergency delivery situations, edited down for maximum dramatic appeal.