Labour and Delivery: The Movie

Don't get excited. There isn't a new movie coming out about childbirth. I just thought it would be nice to compare movie birth to real life birth.

The Hollywood Version
Scene One:
Woman enters the hospital in a wheelchair, clutching her abdomen, screaming in pain. The husband is frantic, sweating and pale. The nurse rushes to them and leads them to a hospital room right away.

Flash to a new scene; the woman is in bed, strapped to monitors and intravenous tubing, screaming obsceneties at her husband. The doctor is looking at the chart, while the nurse reads the monitor. All the while the woman is freaking out on her poor husband, blaming him for putting her in this situation and vowing never to have another child.

Next scene, the woman is sitting forward, knees up with a sheet drapped over them. The doctor is shouting to push. The woman is sweating, teeth clenched, moaning, grunting, screaming while she pushes. Then suddenly the baby is placed on the mother's hospital gown covered chest, looking like a three month old, covered in cheese curd.

The Reality Verson:
Scene One: The mother, her husband and their doula walk into the hospital triage. They are slow because the mother has to stop every now and then to breathe through a contraction. Once the contraction ends, she begins walking again, supported by her partner. He is attentive and they appear to communicate without needing to talk.

The woman is assessed after waiting for a while in triage and then they are moved to a fairly nice room and encouraged to walk. The woman and her support team spend several hours walking, sitting on the birth ball, using the tub or shower and utilizing focused breathing.

The atmosphere is calm and controlled. The mother is listening to her body and her support people are following her lead. Every now and then a nurse appears and checks that all is well and then disappears again.

Eventually it is time to push the baby out. The mother chooses several different positions to push from and follows her instincts and eventually the baby emerges and is placed goopy and bloody on the mother's bare chest and with smiles and tears the woman kisses her newborn baby's head, while her partner kisses her head and tells her how proud he is of her.

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Okay so some of what I put in the reality version was a bit optimistic. Generally women don't get to choose their own positions but occassionally they do and of course there is usually a whole lot of time missing there but overall the moral of all this is the same; reality is much better then fiction.

So stop watching "A Baby's Story" and any other hollywood version of birth, because it is fiction. A story made up and sensationalized for entertainment purposes. Real, non-high risk birth simply isn't scary and horrible enough for Hollywood to film. Sadly though, we as women grow up with these images and horror stories from our sisters and friends and we enter labour and delivery with an expectation of how it is going to go and we end up with a self-fullfilling prophesy and get that horrible birth we were expecting. We aren't taught that birth is normal and safe and beautiful. We can birth with calmness and beauty, but we have to believe it first. So tell your friends, your sisters and your daughters beautiful stories of birth and save your horror stories for Hollywood, and may one day Hollywood will follow suit.