It really isn't. In some genuinely useful and interesting research, Sarah Clement of Guy's and St Thomas's Hospital in London analyzed 92 births seen in one year of TV drama. Of these, our babies and one mother died in childbirth, while another five babies and four mothers experienced life-threatening complications. All these figures are way, way beyond statistical likelihood.
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| Midwife Personality Traits |
In around a third of the TV births labour was so unexpected that either it happened in a strange place or people who should have been there weren't, and the whole thing was over in a trice. And in virtually all the births there was no pain relief: gas and air, pethidine and epidurals cropped up in seven per cent, three per cent and five per cent of the births respectively.
Although my own researches have been less thorough, I should add that I have never seen anyone give birth on TV anywhere but on their and the mother-to-be just screams a lot, rather than yelling 'You fucking, fucking, fucking fuck!' specifically at the father of her child. And the baby just born is always three months old.
PERSONALITY CLASHES
Midwives are people like anyone else. Some you will love almost carnally. Others you may take a dislike to. The midwife at our first birth was young, stroppy and as nurturing as a velociraptor. She regarded our birth plan with contempt and us with barely disguised hostility. My girlfriend, who had been practising yoga and breathing for weeks, was trying to go through labour without heavy duty pain relief, which is to say TENS machine - yes; gas and air - yes; pethidine - let's hope not; and epidural - not on your nelly.
The midwife is supposed to support you, that is her job. This one just said, 'You think you're doing all right now, but you'll be screaming for pain relief before it's all over. Trust me, I only tell the truth.' We were first timers, we were scared stupid, and this vicious little cow made a difficult situation a hundred times worse. Eventually her shift ended and she was replaced by a human being. But by then my girlfriend's confidence had been obliterated and she had bad to have pethidine, to which she had a very unpleasant reaction. It's four years on, but if I saw this midwife in the street I still might have to be physically restrained.
Midwives are central to the birth process, and their importance cannot be overstated. The two we had for the second birth were two of the most impressive people I have ever met: fantastically nurturing, very calm, boundlessly experienced and still possessed of a sense of wonder that made every birth interesting and exciting for them. A woman in labour needs support from someone who knows the ropes, and there is no one better placed to do this than a midwife. (There is a chronic shortage of midwives, incidentally. It's not a glamorous area of medicine, possibly because, on the whole, only women do it. But it's one of the most demanding. It demands empathy and wisdom as well as technical skills.)
The point is that if you get a midwife you can't bear - or more pertinently, who can't bear you - you are entirely within your rights to get her replaced. Even the first time round, we knew this, and yet our birth partner Jane and I did nothing. Instead, we were cowed into submission. Hospitals do this to you. They institutionalise you, even if you have only been there five minutes. The real surprise was that no amount of preparation books read, antenatal classes attended - could prepare us for what happened. One malevolent midwife altered the experience for everybody - not least for the baby, who was relying on her most of all. To find out more, you can check out Midwife Personality Traits.