Full-frontal images of a vagina are available on cable Sunday night, but they come at a price. You have to watch a bloody, hairy baby burst through that vagina, and before that you have to watch the little creature in utero, growing in all its Operation Rescue propaganda detail, in the National Geographic Channel's latest unveiling of the hideous miracle of life. (My emphasis.)

"In the Womb" is actually a cool, beautiful movie, a celebration of computer imaging and the 4-D ultrasound. It exhibits a minimum of politics, probably because it appears to have been made in England, where the acknowledgement that humans in the womb are complex, dreaming, pain-experiencing, memory-having, walk-practicing, music-enjoying entities does not instantly put you in the same camp as doctor assassins and purveyors of "The Silent Scream." (My emphasis.)

n fact, after all the pink-tinted images of the little sweetie with her big eyes, the actual entrance of this baby into the world is something of a shock. First there's the extreme close-up of the genitalia, to the tune of the mother's screams. And then there's the bursting-out of the baby. Sure, she's cute, but she's also discolored and covered in slime. Birth in this otherwise serene movie is a rude awakening, as it always is.