Tapu Misa: Sweaty, messy and not all that pretty - that's childbirth

We didn't have a video camera to record the arrival of our firstborn, but we had a very flash Nikon and several rolls of film at the ready for the big day. Along with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which I'd imagined would be soothing me as I breathed out my first baby.

At least, that's what the new-age midwife who took my antenatal class told me would happen. She was the first person I wanted to hit during my 14 hours of labour.

The second person was my husband, for obvious reasons. Because he was a man. Because it seemed patently unfair that he should get away with making sympathetic noises and rubbing my back when all I really wanted was for him to suffer the same terrible pain.

Suffice it to say that the birth did not go exactly according to plan, the plan being that I would bear the pain with womanly fortitude much like those mythical peasant women I'd been hearing about, who gave birth out in the fields then just carried on working. Easy, peasy.

The reality was that it required heavy-duty drugs (an epidural), some impossibly large-looking tools of the trade (forceps), and a serious assault on my dignity - legs suspended attractively on stirrups while quite a large team of trained professionals regarded me critically from around the end of the bed.

So much for privacy.

When my doctor invited my husband and his camera to join the medical convention at the end of the bed, he wisely declined. He'd turned quite a sickly shade of pale by then, which I hadn't thought possible for a Tongan.

So much for the pictures.

A year later, I was back at the same hospital and this time I was the one peering from the end of the bed, waiting for my nephew's entry into the world while my sister vomited and panted and painfully contracted.

It was sweaty and bloody and messy and not at all pretty, but it was something to see.

I'd bought a video camera by then but it never occurred to me to take it along. My sister, a far grumpier patient than I, would have lobbed it through the window. Or at her poor, guilt-ridden husband.

Ahh, the good old days. Childbirth seemed so much simpler then. Pain and suffering followed by a healthy baby.

You didn't have health boards rushing off to get legal opinions on how to say "no" to the increasing number of perfectly healthy women wanting to have caesareans instead of the so much more painful and less convenient old-fashioned way.

And you didn't have women wanting to give birth for the benefit of a pornographic movie-watching audience.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I must say that in all my time of giving birth and watching others do it I never foresaw the commercial possibilities. Unlike film-maker Steve Crow.

Mr Crow is intent on making the world's first pornographic movie depicting childbirth, and he has a willing accomplice and subject in the now heavily pregnant Nikki, a former stripper who is desperate to become a star, any kind of star.

It's possible, of course, that Nikki is suffering from that hormonally induced mental fog that often afflicts pregnant women. Or that, being a first-timer, she has no idea what she's in for.

If she'd done this before, she would surely know that this is possibly not the best career move for an aspiring porn star, never mind an aspiring mum. A woman may be at her most awe-inspiring during childbirth, but in most cases she looks and feels like hell.

You'd have to be a deeply troubled individual to find that whole messy, painful business sexy and erotic. Then again, maybe that's the point.

Naturally, Nikki's intentions have engendered quite a lot of moral outrage in the community. A judge has ruled that, as misguided as she is, Nikki has every right to allow herself to be filmed in the throes of labour, or indeed passion, as long as the baby doesn't make a guest appearance. It's her show, after all.

She'll have to do it at home or in a private hospital, though, now that Health Minister Annette King has decreed that the filming can't take place in a public hospital. Fair enough, although it's too late already for the baby to escape the consequences of its mother's career choice.

Whether this dooms the poor kid to a life of shame will depend on the community and Nikki. She aspires to be a good mum and despite this unpromising start, who's to say she won't get there? She may yet grow up and discover whatever maternal instincts are lurking beneath her starstruck ambitions. It's happened to unlikelier people.

As for those other women who have eschewed the pain and ecstasy of natural birth for the less bothersome drug-assisted surgeon's knife, well, they don't know what they're missing. Every mother should have at least one horrific birthing story with which to make her children feel guilty.

She should spare them the pictures, though.

* taputapu@paradise.net.nz