10 Plot Ideas For TV / Movie Birth Scenes
by Vicki Elson, MA, CCE, CD www.birth-media.com Feel free to copy this.
1. 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.
2. 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.
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 a different mantra: “I’m doing it!” “Run for the light, baby!” “Yeah!” “This is an interesting sensation that demands all my attention.” “Git ‘er done!” “Bring it on!”
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).