Call the Midwife is back for a fifth season and so are the faculty of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing with a weekly guest blog. Watch the show 7 p.m. Sundays through May 22, then read the blog each Monday morning for historical and contemporary context about the previous night’s episode. SPOILER ALERT: Some posts may contain spoilers.
By Bethany Domzal Sanders
Vanderbilt University School of Nursing
Trust. It’s the cornerstone of the relationship between midwife and mother. In this week’s episode of Call the Midwife, it’s trust in their skills that leads the midwives to transport Ruby to the hospital. It’s what Ruby depends on when she’s tells Sister Julianne she’d be screaming her head off were the sister not there. It’s what’s in her eyes when she asks Sister Julianne to care for her baby while she’s under general anesthesia.
Trust is what Sister Julianne quickly establishes with another mother by showing when she shows compassion by serving her tea during a long labor. And it’s trust in the birth process and trusting the strength of the mother that ultimately proves a midwife wrong when she says “I don’t see that baby being born without forceps.”
Trust is as paramount to labor and birth today as it was in 1961 when this series is set. Obstetric and midwifery care often had a paternalistic nature then, which meant that doctors and midwives made decisions about what was best for women and their babies. Today we seek to empower women to actively participate in their care by providing them with information. But while information is now available everywhere at the touch of our fingertips, quantity isn’t necessarily better and quality can be lacking depending on the source. After all, everyone on the Internet is an “expert,” and it’s sometimes hard to sift through all the opinions to find facts. Midwives today can struggle with establishing the kind of relationship with mothers that allows them to trust midwives’ experience and knowledge over these other voices when things don’t go as planned or desired.
Midwives want to be “with woman.” It’s at the very heart of what we do and it is also the meaning of the word “midwife.” We want to be there through unplanned pregnancies, miscarriage, happy births, surgical births, healthy babies and babies who are only here a short while. We want to earn the trust of the families we serve. In a time when nearly one-third of all babies born in the U.S. are delivered by Cesarean section, we seek to trust women’s bodies and trust birth.
Bethany Domzal Sanders, MSN, CNM, is a member of the Vanderbilt Nurse-Midwives, the clinical practice of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing located at West End Women’s Health Center.