Also, why is it always girls and women who pay the price?
In search of a happy, feel-good show, I started season 5 of Call the Midwife yesterday
Do not do this. Do not watch season 5 if you want warm happiness.
If, however, you need a reminder about how horribly the world has treated women in our lifetimes and how this treatment has put female lives at risk – and even killed them at times, I am sure (CTM is not going to let all of the characters in trouble die, but they are going to get darn close), then watch.
Leaving aside the thalidomide issue, which has presented itself in several of the episodes (AKA incomplete medical research without consideration of how women would be affected), there’s a girl who is hiding her pregnancy while her mother is pretending to be pregnant. The story will be that the mother had the baby. (The girl’s father is away at sea, so there’s no other grownup who could notice that mom is not really pregnant.)
The mom is doing this to protect her teenage daughter from the shame of an out of wedlock pregnancy.
(“Do you know how many of our neighbors have done the same thing?” the mom asks when the daughter protests.)
(Eric Clapton thought his biological mother was his sister.)
Which means the girl gets no pre-natal care and which means when it’s time for the girl to deliver, there is no medical help. True, mom has had four kids and knows how this goes, but when the placenta takes too long to come out, mom is very worried. She gets the advice to pull on the cord to remove the placenta, but while I am watching her do so, I am screaming at the TV, “DO NOT DO THIS! DO NOT DO THIS!”
I thought she would rip the placenta from the uterus and cause hemorrhaging, but that’s not what happens.
Instead, she pulls her daughter’s uterus out (which is something I didn’t even know could happen but seems almost as bad as hemorrhaging).
Please notice nobody is going out of their way, at the risk of his health and life, to protect the father of the baby from shame.
The other episode that struck me (but I am not done with the season yet, so who knows what other horrors await) is the one with the pregnant unwed teacher.
She is pregnant by another teacher – a married man.
But she’s the one who loses her job.
She’s the one whose landlady kicks her out.
She’s the one who sticks a clothes hanger into her uterus and lacerates it, meaning that she collapses in the street, bleeding, and is sent to a hospital where they have to do a hysterectomy, meaning she will now never have children.
She’s the one who faces criminal charges for performing an abortion.
Yes, even if she did it to herself, she could be charged.
The married man/other teacher/father?
His life goes on just fine.
Their lives go on just fine.
Texan in Exile 