Denise French grew up on the Southeast coast of Brazil. She first began her efforts in pro-humanization of births as an attorney practicing family law. Once she was pregnant with her first and only child, she participated in an unique medical study by Dr. Hugo Sabatino, an Argentine-Brazilian physician, scientist and university professor affiliated to the Medical School of the State University of Campinas, São Paulo. This project studied the efficacy of births done in squat positions and Denise was a pioneer for natural vertical births in this study. 

Once in active labor, despite being healthy, well informed, and ready to achieve autonomy in her birth, the attendants, doctors and nurses tried to disturb her natural process with insistent threats of intervention, medicalization, and unnecessary intimidation. 

That experience was a mirror of a fundamental human rights issue, that directed her legal practice to protect women and their right to birth without such manipulations. Understanding that the entire modern obstetric and neontological literature is essentially based on observations of “medicalized’ birth, Denise French started to also support women through childbirth education.  

As a South Florida resident for the past twenty years, working as a childbirth mentor, Denise French’s awakening as a filmmaker came as a result of this terrorizing truth: Like in Brazil, she encountered again the same dehumanization of birth here in the US. She created “Squeezing Orange, The Awakening of Childbirth in South Florida,” in order to bring awareness to the alarming increase in the rising growth of C-sections.