Why do TV dramas have to scare the living daylights out of mothers-to-be?
Stillbirths, agonising shrieks – even a baby born in a lift
THE women shriek like victims of some brutal medieval torture, their faces racked with pain as some hapless chap looks on, perhaps attempting to smooth a furrowed brow.
As if this isn’t a bleak enough picture of birth, the happy result of all this pain — that longed-for newborn cry — is all too often silent, the baby lifeless as the camera zooms in to capture the stricken faces in the delivery room.
It’s a rare event for a TV programme today — be it a historical drama, soap, or, of course, the highly praised Call The Midwife — to show us a ‘normal’ birth. In fact, I’d argue that television is intent on taking us all back to the Dark Ages when it comes to the perception of childbirth.
The impact of all this is so damaging, I’d go so far as to say any woman contemplating childbirth — especially young, impressionable women — might think twice, such is the negative and ( mainly) distorted view they are presented with. You could hardly blame them for being put off for life.
Last week, Call The Midwife star Helen George revealed she’d decided on an elective Caesarean for daughter Wren because she’d been so terrified by the horror stories she’d seen and heard filming the series. ‘Working on Call The Midwife means that lots of people tell you their horror stories about birth,’ she said.
What mums-to-be witness on TV is enough to sap a woman’s confidence in her own ability to have a normal labour and produce a healthy baby without terrible complications.
And by ‘normal’ I don’t mean a fairytale birth, where labour is short and painless, as a perfectly made-up mother pops a baby out while hubby rubs her back.
AfEW lucky women do have this kind of labour, but they’re about as common as the sort of labours we’re presented with on TV. I’m talking about the normal births that most women experience — challenging, painful and intense, but ultimately successful.
for 15 years I was an NCT antenatal teacher. I’m also an anthropologist who trained under the late Sheila Kitzinger, a natural childbirth advocate. She did more than anyone to dispel the cultural ‘ warping’ of childbirth, which had come to be seen as a medical problem to be solved rather than a natural, even pleasurable — if not painless — event.
But I feel strongly that TV has set us back decades in the effort to challenge this perception. Take a recent plot in EastEnders. Stacey, an expectant mother, collapses and has a seizure after a row and is taken to hospital for an emergency Caesarean.
She has pre- eclampsia, a condition where the mother’s blood pressure becomes dangerously high, and she has a second fit before the Caesarean. Her life, and her newborn daughter’s, hang in the balance. Even after Stacey pulls through, she struggles to bond with her baby.
Another EastEnders character, Kim, recently suffered a miscarriage — two years after another storyline in which she went into premature labour.
Meanwhile, Coronation Street recently featured a baby dying after being born at 23 weeks. The mother is shown giving birth surrounded by the sound of crying babies, all the while knowing her son is not going to survive.
Could anyone have dreamed up a more punishing storyline — or a more frightening one? A month later, another character, Leanne, gave birth while trapped in a lift.
And don’t forget the Christmas special of Call The Midwife, which had a gruesome plot in which a baby is declared dead and prepared for burial before someone realises the infant is still alive. Do people really enjoy watching this kind of souped-up suffering, allayed only by a contrived happy ending?
It can be helpful to portray difficult issues on screen. Coronation Street was praised for raising awareness with its stillbirth storyline.
But the constant drip-feed of these tragic depictions ultimately does more damage than good. Yes, things can go devastatingly wrong in pregnancy, but not so often as we’re led to believe. Among women in their late 20s, just eight in 10,000 will have complications that require intensive care, rising to 16 in 10,000 among those in their early 40s.
RArELYdo the horrors depicted so often — premature births, genetic disorders, breech positions, warring partners — actually happen.
To my mind, these negative images of birth are damaging children’s minds in the same way pornographic images can — once seen, they can’t be unseen, and they create a false impression about how the grown-up world really works.
Earlier generations went into labour knowing little more about the science of it than that they might have to put up with pain for a while, but that ‘they would soon forget it’. Women typically witnessed birth much more often: a normal, successful birth was a familiar experience.
As an antenatal teacher in the Seventies and Eighties, I always told mothers-to-be their first job was to close their ears to any old wives’ tales about childbirth. I inevitably found that those with mothers who’d had a negative experience would inherit their anxieties and, often, have similar problems as a result.
Even documentary- style programmes such as Channel 4’s One Born Every Minute focus on the dramatic and the tense, because you have to keep viewers coming back for more.
We all recognise that no two labours are alike and things can go wrong, but in the majority of cases, all is well. Women have never been more carefully monitored at every stage of their pregnancy so that problems can be anticipated and steps taken.
Mothers do not fall prey to the kinds of infections and mishandling that used to produce such high maternal and infant mortality rates. Both infant and maternal mortality rates in this country have fallen in the past 20 years, with infant mortality rates down to 3.7 in 1,000 live births in England and Wales in 2015.
And fewer than one in 10,000 women in the UK died during or due to pregnancy in 2012-14, the lowest level ever, a study found.
Improvements in technology, hygiene and nutrition, plus good physiological and psychological knowledge, means women today should be well prepared. Yet all this can be undermined by the messages they receive from TV.
My niece Jasmine faye, 35, gave birth two years ago and says she avoided TV so she wouldn’t be bombarded with negative images of labour. She says: ‘I had to protect myself from experiences that I knew had been edited for dramatic effect. I didn’t want those images going in.’
Senior nurse Brodie Tucker, 72, who has been practising for 55 years, says: ‘Mothers are more anxious and frightened than they used to be. Pressures on the NHS often mean going in to give birth is not as calm as we’d like it to be. But these dramas that show continual emergency can’t be helping. We need to boost women’s confidence — not destroy it.’
The most surprising birth you could see on TV now would be an uncomplicated natural labour ending with a shot of a happy mother proudly cradling her healthy baby.