Call the Midwife!

ABC had a 2015 BBC program advertised as “Call the Midwife: Christmas Special” on TV last night. I hadn't watched the program before – or any maternity programs for such a long time. I didn't, at the time I watched it, realise that it was from last year, but it wound my memory back. This program introduced an event involving one woman giving birth to twins, and a second woman giving birth to the baby she didn't even know she had! I'd known I was pregnant, but my birth was so different to this!

Call the Midwife was set at the end of the 1950s and into the start of the 1960s. Wikipaedia has a history of it, very interesting to read. During the 50s and 60s my mum had produced our family in the Waikato (Hamilton, New Zealand) hospital. Midwives had helped, but Jane Stojanovic (RM, RGON, MA [Applied], ADN) wrote:

 By the 1950s birth took place in a room very similar to an operating theatre, under very similar conditions to a surgical operation. These procedures persisted; in the 1970s, as a student midwife I remember spending a lot of time acquiring the skills of sterile technique, learning how to cover the woman correctly with sterile drapes which, of course, required the woman to remain in a horizontal position and that necessitated the use of the lithotomy position and ‘stirrups’ to hold her legs in place.

 My brother was kept separate from his new mum each night in his own cradle in a “sleeping room” filled with babies. I don't know if this happened for me and my sisters in the 50s. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any photos of the Waikato Hospital back then but I do remember the old ward when dad took me and my siblings to see mum and my youngest sister born in the 60s.

This again changed a lot by the time I was pregnant in the early 1980s. By then, in the Elizabeth Rothwell Building, (based in the Waikato Hospital) there seemed to be no midwives unless you had chosen them. For some reason, midwives had disappeared. I had a back injury which annoyed me so much that the anaesthetist gave me an epidural in my back – I had a very easy birth. I had my daughter in the Taupo hospital, but they didn't allow epidurals. I could have chosen to go to Rotorua hospital, but my mum had come to Taupo to look after my son while I was in hospital so I didn't want to leave her. I screamed so much during my birth; I even remember just wanting to get up and leave the hospital and I'd be okay outside! Of course, that didn't happen... Yet I cannot remember midwives in either of my births in either hospital.

Midwives are now back full time. The Ministry of Health page lists Waikato Hospital as a supplier of “teritary maternity facilities”, and the other 9 facilities throughout Waikato are called “primary maternity facilities” - although “[y]ou can choose where you have your baby – at home, in a birthing centre or small maternity unit, or in hospital.” 

For my own birth and for the births of my children my memory has its own story, just very briefly mentioned here. Anyone who watches Call the Midwife might never have been to London, but for me it was a good reminder of my own city when I was little. It also intrigued me enough to look up more information about midwives then and now.

I think I might watch it again.

Waikato Hospital, Hamilton NZ