Midwife attended births in prime-time television: Craziness, controlling bitches, and ultimate capitulation

Despite ongoing challenges, the medical approach to maternal care that achieved preeminence in the early 1920s has prevailed. Increasing evidence that fictionalized accounts of important social issues can influence the ways people make sense of and make choices with regard to their health may suggest popular media representations of pregnancy and childbirth facilitate the cultural indulgence of the medical model and contestation of the midwifery model. In this analysis, I focus on three prime-time television series: Dharma & Greg, The Gilmore Girls and Girlfriends, each of which featured a storyline in which one of the characters has chosen a midwife for her primary attendant in an uncomplicated pregnancy/childbirth. I argue that these representations craft coherent narratives of midwife attended births that stand in sharp contract to the midwifery model and invoke and support rationales of the medical model. In sum, these representations undermine the midwife-attended birth as an irrational choice, depict the midwife as a controlling bitch, and ultimately affirm the need for the dominant medical model.