Mila Kunis stirs controversy with natural birth comments

CEBU, Philippines -  Mila Kunis is planning a natural delivery for the birth of her first child with Ashton Kutcher later this year, but her reasons for doing so may have triggered yet another round of the mommy wars.

During an interview on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Kunis said she intends to forgo an epidural, saying, “The hospital that I’m going to be laboring in does a midwife doula type of thing. I’m going to do it as all natural as I possibly can unless there’s an emergency or something that should go wrong.”

And then she added, “I did this to myself, I might as well just do it right. I wanted this!”

Do it “right?” Cue the backlash, which has already come in droves.

A user named Erin commented on People.com, “Like Mila but just because you use an epidural during child birth doesn’t mean you are not ‘doing it right.’”

An anonymous user added, “What’s ‘right’ is doing whatever is safest for baby and mom, which depends on the labor situation. There’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to give birth. Hopefully she gets a tad less judgmental after she has kids and realizes that it’s not a competition.”

Author Kelly Oxford tweeted to her 573,000 followers, “SAD NEWS: Looks like some women have a baby wrong.”

In all likelihood, Kunis didn’t intend to start a commotion but nevertheless, her comments touched upon a nerve central to the “mommy wars,” a term first introduced to the public consciousness in 1989 when a writer named Felice Schwartz published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “Management Women and the New Facts of Life.”

In the report, Schwartz made a straightforward point that some women in the workforce were more career-focused, others took a few years off to focus on their families before returning to their positions. Since then, there’s been a sharp divide between two “types” of women, which has spilled over into areas like childbirth (natural or medicated?) and breastfeeding.