Birth-Media.com   What do you REALLY need to know about birth?

Here are 12 guidelines and 10 free plot ideas.  Add your own by clicking “Leave a Comment” above.  

12 GUIDELINES

1.  Acknowledge that at least part of your audience is currently pregnant, or will be pregnant at some time in the future.  Acknowledge that TV and movie birth scenes do influence many people’s beliefs, behaviors, choices, and even psychological and physical responses to labor.  Find your best resource here.

2.  Recruit a midwife, obstetrician, OB nurse, or labor support “doula” to ensure accuracy.  Be careful to select somebody whose agenda is to respectfully portray realistic birth.  Find a consultant here.  Find accurate information, books, and films here.

3.  Remember that mothers are the real heroes of birth.  Their partners and caregivers may help them, but the focus should be on the person doing most of the work.  Portray partners and caregivers as supportive, not bossy or controlling.

4.  Use your creativity so you don’t have to rely on the old clichés of exaggerating danger, speed, and pain.  Birth can be terrifying or fearless but it’s usually just a straightforward biological function.  Birth can take minutes or days but it’s usually several hours.  Birth can be excruciating or enjoyable but it’s usually just a lot of very hard work that mothers adapt to.  Usually, nothing needs to be “fixed.”

5.  Refuse to sensationalize, mock, or exploit laboring women.

6. Find alternatives to fearmongering and myths like “birth is dangerous and women always need to be medically rescued.”  Fearmongering is:  adding a scary voiceover to normal birth footage, listing all the things that could go wrong, making over-medicalization appear unquestioningly routine, or portraying disastrous outcomes as if they are the norm.

7. Find alternatives to the opposite myth as well: “birth is romantic and women should always have orgasms.”  Portray the truth: birth is usually very hard work, usually uncomplicated, and usually satisfying.  It can be an opportunity for self-discovery and for deepening one’s capacity for love.

8.  Find the drama inherent in a new human being traveling from the quiet darkness inside a hardworking woman out into the world of light and first breath.  Find the humor in the role change of a lifetime, from being responsible only for oneself to being responsible for a helpless creature with whom one is hopelessly in love.

9.  Portray laboring women in upright positions actively moving around, squatting, lunging, rocking, swaying, walking, dancing.  Gravity and motion are important for normal birth – the mass media have perpetuated the image of the mother lying down for her entire labor, and that has got to change!

10.  Portray breastfeeding as normal and healthy, but women who don’t breastfeed needn’t be judged.

11.  Portray vaginal birth as normal and healthy.   Narcotics, epidural anesthesia, cesareans, and other interventions are useful in some cases.  Portray them as procedures to be used judiciously, not routinely.

12.  Be inclusive in who you choose to portray.  Among parents, partners, and caregivers, there are endless variations in age, ethnicity, relationship status, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and health status. 

10 PLOT IDEAS

1.  A teen mother births easily, breastfeeds, loves her baby, finishes school, and finds satisfying work with the support of her family and friends.  It’s not easy, but she is learning fast.  Now that’s radical!  She finds herself being a role model for women both younger and older than herself, as well as an advocate for family planning.

2.  Construction noises disturb a laboring woman until she learns she can relate to them: singing the low sound of a drill, dancing to the rhythm of a hammer, breathing along with a shop-vac.  When the crew gets ready to go home, she begs them to keep working, only louder.  They oblige and give her a hard hat as a souvenir.

3.  Hospital staff with personal dramas get a fresh perspective when a mentally challenged rape victim has a beautiful birth and falls in love with her baby.

4.  A couple having a hard time thinking of a name for their baby are still brainstorming during labor, inspired by all the things and people that are helping them: the view out the window (Tree), the music coming from somewhere down the hall (Steely Dan), the friendly nurse from afar (Madagascar), the natural hormone of labor (Oxytocin).

5.  A long labor kicks into gear when the mother switches from “I can’t” to “I’m just going to get the job done” and starts striding around the hospital saying “I’m doing it!”

6.  A laboring woman makes long, low sounds, very loud.  Two women laboring in neighboring hospital rooms start harmonizing.  The first woman’s partner is suffering from “composer’s block,” until the chords unleash his creativity.

7.  A woman with disabilities or terrible self-doubt discovers her spectacular power during a well-supported labor.

8.  A woman tells her neighbors to start cooking for her when they hear her bellowing in labor.  But she gets into a meditative state and gives birth silently in her bathtub, with her midwives helping.  Afterward, she’s really hungry for all the promised food, and her neighbors have to fake it with take-out.

9.  A woman gathers all sorts of things to look at during labor: Christmas lights, flowers, pictures of stretching cats and flowing rivers.  She spends her whole labor looking at her partner’s eyes instead.  Or she closes her eyes and doesn’t look at anything.

10.   A woman gives birth while incarcerated, and her baby is scheduled to go into foster care out of state.  At the last minute, private detectives hired by the local department of children and families (this is based on a real program in St. Louis, Missouri) discover that she has a third cousin living two towns over who is willing to care for the baby AND pick up the mother’s pumped and frozen breastmilk AND bring the baby to visit the mother in jail for weekly visits during which she can breastfeed in person (this part is based on a true story in Chicopee, Massachusetts).