On Sunday evenings I enjoy watching “Call the Midwife” if I’m home. It shows nursing care at its best. The camaraderie among the nuns and midwives is heartening. The midwives and nuns support and encourage each through difficult situations.
The television program is based on the memoirs of a midwife, Jennifer Worth, who served the East End of London during the 1950s. She wrote a book titled, The Midwife.
“Call the Midwife” has been presenting situations described in the book.
The program this past Sunday showed a scene from the book, but the circumstances were changed. The violence of an illegal abortion was dramatized. In the chapter titled Café Life, Jennifer Worth tells about a young woman she befriended and helped. Mary was pregnant and trying to escape from a prostitution ring she had been trapped in. Mary’s friend, another prostitute, had become pregnant and was forced to have an abortion. Mary witnessed her death.
In the television drama the woman who has the illegal abortion is the mother of eight children. She is depicted as a woman who was overwhelmed, could not nurture another child. After being rushed to the hospital she is diagnosed with septicemia, slips into a coma, but eventually survives and returns to her family. With a picture of the family on the screen a narrator spoke about the plight of women in the 1950s who did not have contraceptives available to them.
Previous episodes of “Call the Midwife” have been true to the memoir. I am curious about the reason for changing the details for this story. Was the true story too tragic, too graphic to include? It makes me think about a situation that the national news media is having difficulty reporting.
Finally. at the end of Kermit Gosnell’s trial some major news outlets have released reports about it. At the Gosnell Clinic in Pennsylvania a woman died after an abortion. Infants that were reported to survive the abortion procedure in this clinic had their spinal cords snipped. Young people with no medical training were providing “care” in an unclean site.
A local paper in Pennsylvania has covered the story from the beginning. In the Philadelphia Weekly, Tara Murtha wrote a column about the clinic. She reported the findings of of a team of investigators that raided the clinic in 2010.
According to the report, “semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with bloodstained blankets.” Blood was splattered all over the dirty floor.
On “Call the Midwife” the narrator concluded the abortion story with comments about contraception. I felt a little uncomfortable with the nice resolution to the abortion story. Abortion hasn’t gone away with the widespread use of contraception. An interesting article by Janet Smith Phd points out the connection between contraception and abortion.
If you have been reading my blogs for a while you are probably aware that I am concerned about the health risks associated with hormonal birth control over a period of years. My post on March 5 of this year links to research studies.
Hormonal pills and abortion are considered “health care” and a woman’s right. The idea that we have freed women and resolved problems in women’s health with the availability of contraception and legal abortion is a common opinion. Do you think this is true?
Linking up with Heart + Home and Thoughtful Thursday and Womanhood with Purpose
