Mother of Many: The Film

This was a very interesting animated film about the life of a hospital based midwife.  It’s in a film contest.  I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

NHS YouTube Video Campaign Teaches Teens that Birth is Humiliating

The Leicester NHS Trust posted an anti-teen pregnancy campaign video on YouTube aimed at teaching school-age girls and young women that sex (or unprotected sex) should be avoided because it can result in pregnancy, which will end with birth, which is excruciating, humiliating and shameful.

From The Sun on May 15, 2009:

The video appears to have been filmed with a mobile phone camera to give an air of authenticity and had more than 1,000 hits before it was removed.

At first it looks like another sad example of happy-slapping featuring a gang of secondary school pupils crowding round in a school playground.

Excited children are seen running towards a crowd with youngsters egging on what seems to be a fight.

A girl in the centre is seen screaming while another has blood on her cheeks.

But as the camera moves in closer one of the teenagers can be seen on the ground in the middle of labour.

In explicit detail it shows the girl giving birth and the baby being delivered by a fellow pupil as other students yell and jeer at her.

The footage was intended as a shock tactic to highlight rocketing teen pregnancies by harnessing the publicity power of the internet.

But Leicester NHS did not anticipate YouTube?s stringent content rules and today their clip was replaced after less than a day online with a message saying ?This video has been removed due to terms of use violation?.

Renee of Womanist Musings has the video linked in her post ?Naughty Girls Give Birth in Public in Great Britain.? Please visit her site to view the video which is no longer available on YouTube and read the rest of her sociological analysis of the video, some of which is excerpted below:

This little video teaches young girls that should they engage in sexual activity, the punishment for their behaviour is a painful labour. It is very reminiscent of the punishment assigned Eve for giving Adam the apple in the garden of Eden. The father is quite typically absent from this scenario mirroring the privileging of masculinity in our social discourse. It is women that are constructed as ?controlling? sex and therefore the abandonment of men of their parental obligations is rarely a subject that receives much discussion. Note that this ad is supposed to serve as a warning against teenage sex and yet it is aimed solely at girls as though she became pregnant by herself.

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This advertisement teaches young girls that pregnancy is a punishment rather than a natural outcome of sex, this further supporting the idea that unless conception occurs inside the patriarchal family it is a sign of lasciviousness whereas; a man is not stigmatized for participating in pre marital sex. Though this ad is projected to teach kids to act responsibly when it comes to sex, it comes across as highly sexist in its determination to make women responsible and produce fear about a natural biological process.

From a birth activist perspective, this campaign?s premise is extremely troubling. Many women experience psychologically and emotionally traumatic births for reasons such as inadequate emotional support, a fearful birth space, a birth space full of strangers or care providers who resort to humiliation or bullying to gain compliance. In other words, the feelings that some women experience in a hospital would mimic the presumed feelings of this teenager giving birth while taunted by schoolmates.

The goal of this video was clearly to show birth as a humiliating, painful and scary consequence to bad behavior, which is one of the reasons that Catherine Skol is suing obstetrician Scott Pierce. Pierce allegedly told a nurse that Skol deserved to feel pain for not calling before coming to the hospital and that sometimes ?pain is the best teacher.?

So where will teenagers see positive birth videos? Unfortunately, they will not see them on YouTube, which routinely censors or removes birth videos or requires that viewers be 18 years of age. One of the many negative consequences of moving birth from a home model to an industrialized hospital model in the last 70 years is that birth is that the birth process has become unfamiliar to most people. This goes for all mammalian births?how many of our parents or grandparents moved away from rural areas where they regularly saw animals give birth?

Internet birth activism and flooding social media outlets with positive and realistic images of normal birth have never been more relevant or necessary.