On a trip I caught a rerun of HIMYM and Lili was giving birth. Of course, it had the classic “I want the drugs!!!” and the answer “it’s too late”. Then, the mother-to-be crushes someone’s hand.
It got me thinking that most film/TV births are like that, with a screaming mother pulverising a friend’s fingers; when they show the birth.
C-sections are only for live-or-death situations, in fact, they are the whole point of the episode. Nobody wants an epidural.
Also, it’s always the semi-seated, in-your-room type and never in an operating room, lying on her back.
Pretty much every birth I’ve seen on TV is vaginal, but sometimes they’re easy, and sometimes not, depending on drama value. Births in hospitals seem pretty rare, unless there’s drama, even though the typical birth takes place in a hospital even if it’s an easy birth. (If there’s any drama in real life, usually it’s getting to the hospital.)
Once in a blue moon there will be a Caesarean section, but only for drama reasons. (Supposedly some women are getting C-sections for the sake of convenience, but I understand if there were complications with a birth, it might be a good idea to get a C-section for subsequent births.)
There are over 80 births on Call the Midwife, some more difficult and dramatic than others. They range from the sterile with stirrups hospital deliveries that were beginning to become the norm in the 1950s, to ladies either alone or with one of the midwives right on the sitting-room carpet. One was a poor teenaged girl by herself in an empty house. I do recall at least one cesarean, as well as at least two very tricky breeches.
For the record, i was in the room when a friend gave birth and that’s almost exactly what happened. She never said she didn’t want the drugs, but she dialated too quickly. So The nurse came in and said " no drugs yet, you need to be closer" and the next visit was " you are too far along for the epidural now."
When women on TV deliver their babies unattended, they always lie flat on their back with their legs up, and sometimes their feet pressed against something. In real life, if a woman is allowed to assume any position she wants, she will usually squat or crouch on her hands and knees in a frog-like position.
Yeah, I’d agree. My experience would fit in nicely with some sort of sitcom hijinx including a bus ride to the hospital, getting out of bed and declaring I was through and going home, and me telling the doctor that I would get off the table and stitch his balls together and tell him to be still when he told me the same during the stitching up of the episiotomy. Right after I told him I feel every little thing going on down there, isn’t there some spray or something to deaden it? ETA: I was in Brooklyn at the time.
On Star Trek: The Next Generation, there were two birth scenes that I remember. Deanna Troi giving birth to her son Ian was virtually painless, but that’s because he was an alien presence. Keiko O’Brien giving birth to Molly, on the other hand…
“Push, Keiko. Push! Push! PUSH!”
“I AM PUSHING!”
On Deep Space Nine, Kira Nerys gave birth to the O’Brien’s second child, Kirayoshi. Unlike human mothers, Bajoran mothers require as much peace and calm during the birthing process as possible; she has to be totally relaxed.
When I was taking my first Lamaze class (1992), we were warned before the video was played: “This was filmed in California, where they’re loud. Midwestern women don’t scream this much.” And she wasn’t joking.
How women act in labor is in a great deal dependent on where they are and what they’ve seen. In many times and places, girls would witness several births before they gave birth themselves, and take their cues from those deliveries. This has led some cultures to be silent, or nearly so, during childbirth, and others to scream all the way.
And I think there’s a good argument to be made that women are still doing that, only we don’t see many, if any, childbirths in real life before we’re in the hotseat. So now we’re taking our cues from overly dramatic actors faking it for the camera, often women who have never experienced it themselves.
(See also: porn.)
(See also: chemotherapy, which is often not nearly as awful or dramatic as movies/TV would have you believe. This one is deadly, as people sometimes get an idea in their head about what chemo will be like, and refuse it, based on a fictitious portrayal.)
Yeah, but Call the Midwife is about poor women giving birth 60 years ago; it’s the premise.
Exactly.
Most women in Peru deliver flat on their backs when in clinics/hospital. However, the option of “parto vertical” (the Andean tradition of the mother sitting on the edge of a chair of squatting while holding a rope for support) is now obligatory in state hospitals.
Yeah, but women giving birth in US private hospitals get epidurals. Rachel in “Friends” screams like a woman in “Call the Midwife”.