The "death-in-childbirth" device also confirms an understanding of the female body as dangerous and diseased. Yes, women do face injury and sometimes death in the process of giving life, but that's the exception. Even when maternal mortality rates were many times what they are today, the vast majority of births ended well. One of the best pieces of documentary evidence available to us on childbirth in early America—the diary of midwife Martha Ballard of Maine (1785-1815)—lists just a single maternal death in nearly 2,000 births.
Of course, suspenseful plots depend on things going wrong. But does the drama always have to come from a woman's body malfunctioning in some way? Can't we get a little narrative confirmation for all the millions of times the body gets it exactly right? It's like all the movie plot lines centering around plane crashes, when all the while you're more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport. The dying-in-childbirth device exaggerates risk and unwittingly confirms, for many people, the need to give birth with a surgical crash-team in the next room.
That, for me, is the rub. Americans have great faith in the power of medical science, but lack faith in women's bodies to get the job done. Our fears are confirmed by the many fictional plotlines that kill off the mother to crank up the drama.
In reality, despite having some of the highest rates of medical induction and c-section in the world, and despite the fact that dying in childbirth is still a very remote possibility for most American women, rates of maternal mortality are higher today than they were in the late 1970s. American women are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in Greece, and 40 other countries are ahead of the U.S. in terms of maternal health.
What's more, "near misses"—complications that nearly result in death—have increased 25 percent since 1998. Women who are poor, who are African American, who are Native American or who do not speak English are the ones most likely to die or to face grave complications. Some attribute these modern-day deaths and injuries to the overuse of medical technology. For example, a woman is as many as three times more likely to die from a caesarean.
Responding to rising maternal mortality doesn't mean advocating one kind of birth over another—it's a complicated problem requiring a multi-faceted solution. Still, with birth and new birth so near the heart of our faith narrative, Christians need to embrace maternal health, here and abroad, in real life and on our TV screens, as an issue of our common good.
Joss Barratt / PBS 
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Heather Munn
Well, Janet, my point wasn't about the show as such. My point was that fiction means something, the event in the show means something. It seems you believe that what was presented in the show does reflect important realities, so I would say we agree on the idea that fiction means something. I was not really making a point about the show (which I haven't watched) but making a point that "it's just fiction" is not an adequate defense of it. It's appropriate to criticize fiction for giving its audience a false perception of reality, because giving a perception of reality is what fiction does. One BIG problem I have with the general trend of fiction is its portrayal of miscarriage--in fiction, miscarriage is almost always someone's fault, which is very untrue to reality, and harmful. That would be worth a her.meneutics article sometime! Oh, and thank you, Tim!
S Griffin
Since the article is about a "show" you can always change the station and find something else to watch. No profound answers needed here. It's real simple. Watch something else.
JANET W
Heather, I don't know if I get your point. The author of the article wasn't necessarily saying that the scripting was poorly worded or the scene was somehow not "true to life" -she was commenting that viewers would equate childbirth with being a dangerous and possibly life-threatening condition (which, quite honestly, it is). She then went on to comment that because the vast majority of physicians are men, that women are set up to wait for their "knight in shining armour" in the guise of a physician during child-birth. Ridiculous. The truth is that in 3rd world countries, a whole lot of women die in child-birth. Not just babies. Mothers. And the reason this is so, is because there is no one trained (whether it be a male or female) with the know-how and medical technology available to save that mother's life. We should be marveling that in our industrialized countries that women no longer hold a real fear of dying in child-birth. That wasn't the reality for our grandmothers.
Tim Fall
Heather Munn, that is one of the best and most concise defenses of lit crit I've ever read. Well put. Cheers, Tim (timfall.wordpress.com)
Heather Munn
How come whenever someone criticizes a work of fiction, have a dozen people show up and yell "IT'S JUST FICTION!" I've seen it on Amazon too, and I honestly do not understand it. Yes, it's fiction, that's the point. What, you think she should criticize someone for dying in childbirth in real life? I write fiction. When I decide to have something major happen in a book--like a character dying--I think it over carefully. It means something. I am saying "This is what life is like." If I set up a major event in a book a certain way and someone came along and criticized what she thought it said about life, and someone else popped up and defended me by saying "It's just fiction!" I'd be way more angry at the defender. Because what *she's* saying is that my work means nothing, says nothing about life, and I wasted my time putting thought & sweat & care into it because its only purpose is to distract people briefly from their problems.
Hannah N.
You know what I liked about it? The portrayal of the fact that C-sections are sometimes necessary and life-saving. After having it drilled into me through birth education classes and whatnot that the U.S. has too many "unnecessesareans," I ended up having a medically necessary emergency C-section. It took a lot of processing for me to come to terms with it, but I do genuinely believe it was the right decision. My doula was very helpful in this process of understanding, too. She was not a natural birth advocate, but an advocate for me. Sometimes I wish well-meaning natural birth advocates would consider that many of us would love to make those "choices" but weren't able to. Maybe our higher death rates in childbirth are attributable to lack of quality prenatal care for underinsured women? And not to caesareans or "overuse of technology"?
LAURA C STEEL
Lady Sybil had to die because the actress portraying her did not renew her contract for next season. If Sybil hadn't died in childbirth, some other cliche would have had to be employed: being pushed down the stairs or eating the wrong mushrooms. There weren't a lot of good choices.
Christian Lawyer
Rachel, come on, "modern media" hasn't portrayed childbirth stories as "ones in which women lie passively waiting for their prince to come in the form of an OB-GYN to perform surgery, stat." at least since Marcus Welby, M.D., which is almost certainly before you were born. Today, they show women actively participating, even when the birth is in a hospital or involves a C-section. Plus, the OB/GYNs are almost all women now. That's hardly a comparison to the passive women in Christian fiction or Harlequin romances waiting for their prince to come. As you suggested, I found your articles at Sojourners and liked the one comparing the health care systems in various countries. But, I also found your article last year on maternal mortality and birth control, where you said "[r]ecently I’ve become aware that unwanted pregnancies are nothing new," and my jaw is still hanging.
Kathi Vande Guchte
This is rediculous. It's TV SHOW, and a show I watch every Sunday and then discuss with my colleague, Paula on Mondays. The whole article writing about 1. the best way to give birth; 2. where to give birth; 3. how to feed babies. Oh good grief, enough already. No one cares.
Samantha Blythe
I have had 5 homebirths, so I totally agree that 1) a woman's body is designed to give birth and 2) that unnecessary medical intervention often causes problems...however, toxemia is a very, very dangerous condition and is probably the main thing midwives are looking for at prenatal appointments - that is why they have you pee in a cup (to check for protein in your urine), ask you if you have been swelling, look for high blood pressure and are concerned if you have a strangely large jump in weight. They want to catch what is known as pre-eclampsia before it becomes full-blown eclampsia, which is what killed Sybil. Samantha http://nospringchickennomore.blogspot.com/
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