Call The Midwife

No.113: June 24, 2022

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Photo by Thiago Borges

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Dear Friends,

As this newsletter hits your inbox this morning it is no doubt accompanied by some other notification (Apple News? CNN?) that the United States Supreme Court has just issued an opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Heath that overrules Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision which wrote a right to abortion into the U.S. Constitution. Praise God, and dance on the grave of that evil document. As it happens, the Dobbs decision is also serendipitous timing for today’s newsletter.

A couple of weeks ago The Square Inch newsletter was entitled “The Jayhawk & The Human.” It was a somewhat extended reflection on the value of children. Contrary to so much conventional wisdom of young marrieds wondering whether or not to have kids, as well as the cocktail party class in liberal urban enclaves who fret about the damage children are causing to Mother Earth, children are not debits, they are credits; not burdens, but blessings; not “mouths to feed,” but creative, industrious humans made imago Dei. As the image of God, they are intrinsically valuable. They intuit, think, speak, work, produce, and innovate. They are full-orbed exponential “value-adds” and “force multipliers” to human civilization.

Sometimes civilizations such as ours fail to fully appreciate this fact. I.e., The United States of America, circa 1973-2022.

A reader of that newsletter made an insightful comment. He thought there was a connection between my Jayhawk essay and another one I wrote previously on Moloch, the ancient god of child sacrifice. And he is exactly right. It is Moloch who wants us to devalue children by seeing them as inert societal deficits. In that essay I emphasized the flexibility of his messaging:

Moloch has had many names. He held court at the trash heaps of Sparta and Rome, where people discarded their unwanted babies. He once had vast temples among the Aztecs where they slaughtered millions of children. And for the past fifty years he has enjoyed unfettered freedom in the fluorescent glow of the American abortion clinic, where he has accepted our own slaughter of millions of children. He goes by many names, but it seems his favorite is “Choice.” Americans like freedom, so why not sell child sacrifice as, well, freedom?

Today I am going to suggest that his messaging is even more subtle than that. To do so, I am going to have to step on some toes. I am going to write something negative about what is possibly one of your favorite television shows. I am ready for the hate mail, if you must. But I’d prefer if you first hear me out.

Call The Midwife

I will admit upfront that what I am about to say may or may not apply to the entirety of the BBC’s critically acclaimed series, Call The Midwife. Despite all the usual and expected trappings of excellence—amazing cast, characters, sets, costumes, and music—I have very little interest in a show about gynecology. And that, for better or worse, is what it is. My girls all persuaded me to sit down and watch Season 1, Episode 1—because I generally love BBC costume dramas—and I quickly concluded that I cannot watch women screaming in labor as a form of entertainment.

If you are not familiar, Call The Midwife is a series about a group of midwives serving in London’s East End during the 1950s and 60s. It is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, and the show has been a smash favorite of many, many women I know.

I found Episode 1 to be a very subversive bit of propaganda, and I got an initial bit of familial outrage for voicing that opinion. So I understand how you feel. I am sure that my view sounds implausible. How could a show that so obviously and unashamedly celebrates newborn babies and the people who help bring them into the world be subversive?

Because this episode doesn’t celebrate newborn babies. It celebrates wanted newborn babies. That is not an insignificant difference. The former is what God requires; the latter is what Moloch desires. He needs leftovers.

The opening voiceover explains that “Midwifery is the very stuff of life. Every child is conceived in love or lust. And born in pain, followed by joy or by tragedy and anguish. Every birth is attended by a midwife. She is in the thick of it. She sees it all.

Already in these opening sentences our attention is drawn not so much to the child, but to the child’s context. Conceived in love or lust? Received with joy or anguish? The metrics for moral evaluation have already shuffled the child aside. What matters is the familial and social context. A context about which Jenny has been blissfully unaware. Her voiceover continues in this vein, how little she knew of love and passion and how people lived in squalor and filth, “four to a bed.” The show, from the very start, is about how Jenny comes to understand the complexities of her social context.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with framing an issue in its context, but that framing is never itself a neutral thing. Evaluation and judgment is being made. Arguably the key moment in Episode 1 happens when Jenny accompanies Sister Evangelina on her very first appointment. They are riding their bikes down the street, and Sister Evangelina explains;

“There are between 80 and 100 babies born each month in Poplar. As soon as one vacates its pram, another one takes its place. And thus it was, and ever shall be until such time as they invent a magic potion to put a stop to it.”

Ah, the “magic potion” that “puts a stop” to all this breeding—now we get more than a glimpse of the show’s overall worldview. Women are victims of pregnancy, and they are heroines for enduring it back in the bad old days without magic potions (and in later seasons, I suspect, abortions). The show visually emphasizes over and over the excessive number of babies. It is clearly exaggerated for effect. A random scene shows two babies in a single pram outside the neonatal clinic, while Mom is inside getting examined for her current pregnancy—to whom Jenny announces, “Twins!” Over a cup of tea in her bedroom, one of Jenny’s young colleagues just says the moral of the story outright: “The mothers are the brave ones. Baby after baby in abominable conditions and they keep on going. They’re the heroines. I’m just here to help.”

As for Jenny, she learns her lessons well. In the penultimate scene she stands with a woman of ill-repute who has just lost her child. Responding to a question, Jenny says, “As a matter of fact, I think you’re all heroines.”

I have no doubt that women are heroines. They sacrifice for their children, all-too-often in abominable conditions. The problem is that the show puts itself into a very awkward position. On the one hand, women are victims of pregnancy; “baby after baby after baby” is presented as a horrible thing, and the conditions in which this takes place are presented as revolting. It’s the stuff of which Ebenezer Scrooge would be proud, with all his talk of the “surplus population” crowding around him in London. On the other hand, the show also wants to appeal to maternal instincts, to celebrate love and life, and to somehow paint childbirth as a wonderful thing. But which is it? How does one square this circle? How can one both love babies and share Ebenezer Scrooge’s dismal view of childbearing and the world?

Call The Midwife’s solution to this conundrum, I believe, is found in the contrast between the two main stories in Episode 1.

Conchita Warren is war bride from the Spanish Civil War—brought home by her husband at age 14, and maybe even younger (the legalities, we are told early on, are shrouded in mystery). She speaks no English and he speaks no Spanish. She has given birth to twenty-four children, with two sets of twins, one after the other. She is pregnant with number 25, and her husband proudly announces that “they’ve not lost one yet!” Their home is packed with the brood, but the atmosphere is light and welcoming. The family dynamic is outstanding; a loving, attentive, and enthusiastic father; a father and mother who cannot even communicate in spoken language nevertheless look at each other with beaming eyes of love; all 26 of them (plus Jenny) crammed around a chaotic dinner table full of laughter and joy. This is a loving home.

Pearl Winston, by contrast, lives in squalor, has wild children who urinate on the floor and chairs. She can barely care for them. And she is pregnant by an adulterous affair. She also has syphilis and barely even bothers to notice a massive tumor in her nether regions. Jenny is shaken and revolted when she discovers this. She asks her supervisor: “How could she not have known? How could she have felt that thing and never cared?”

“Pearl Winston isn’t accustomed to caring, or indeed, being cared about,” is the reply.

That’s a fairly heavy-handed framing, isn’t it? Two expectant mothers. Conchita is loved and desperately wants her baby, and Pearl is entirely unloved and couldn’t care less about hers. Conchita has a husband and family beyond excited about the new arrival, Pearl has nobody and is bitterly cynical.

Conchita’s baby arrives prematurely and apparently stillborn, but miraculously revives to general astonishment. The doctors try to take the preemie to the hospital but she forcefully refuses, saying; “He will die. He stays with me. I’m his hospital. He’s my blood.” The head nurse tells Jenny: “Time will tell whether Conchita can succeed. We must see what love can do.”

We must see what love can do.

Pearl loses her baby as a complication from her syphilis. “Did you hear I lost it?” (“it”) she asks. “I’m so sorry,” says Jenny. “Can’t win ‘em all,” replies Pearl. No tears are shed.

This theme continues through the closing voiceover: I had begun to see what love can do. Love brought life to the world and women to their knees. Love had the power to break hearts and to save. Love was like midwifery, the very stuff of life.

What is the message of this drama? It struck me forcefully when I first watched, and even more so on a second viewing: the decisive moral factor for evaluating the good of childbirth is the love someone has for the child. The wanted child lives to great celebration, even if he is the twenty-fifth of the family. The unwanted child is an “it” who vanishes with not a single tear. The child with a loving family is a treasure; the child of the downtrodden, poor, single woman is trash that can be discarded.

And that, my friends—without downplaying one bit the importance of social and cultural factors—is a deadly subversion of the truth. The value of a child—his or her worthiness of celebration, if you will, or worthiness of lament if lost—is not in any way, shape, or form dependent on the value others place on him or her. This is why we Christians insist (or ought to insist!) on intrinsic dignity and worth, not extrinsic dignity and worth (something conferred from the outside). The value of your life is not dependent on whether people like you, love you, or even want you, and that remains true of every human being no matter their stage of development.

For all its talk about “love,” that kind of unconditional love is not the message of the sexual revolution which, of course, eventually achieved its “magic potions” and technologies so as to liberate women from the “slavery” of pregnancy. Still today (especially today, now that Roe is gone) they speak of the need for abortion for “unwanted pregnancies,” as if the “unwanted” part is the single decisive moral factor. But it is no moral factor at all, so far as the worth of the child and his or her entitlement to legal protection are concerned. By all means, let’s address the abominable conditions and the lack of familial connections and loyalties, but we must never compensate for those adult failures by taking it out on helpless and innocent babies.

Call The Midwife is, without a doubt, a compelling show. But this episode, at least, is also morally subversive in the subtlest of ways.

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It is not easy to find good photographs on the Internet that you can use freely without obtaining a fairly expensive license. I found a site called Pexels.com, on which thousands of photographers have put their wares up for free. After you download a photo, Pexels asks if you’d like to give a donation to the photographer.

Expensive licenses from most of the big sites like Photostock or Getty are beyond my pay grade, so I have been delighted with this option. I have started contributing a small donation whenever I download a photo for use on The Square Inch (although today’s photographer had no donation button for some reason). Lo and behold, I got an email from a photographer. It said, and I quote, “What a nice surprise to see that somebody honors the picture. You will not believe, but you are the first one taking the time to send this ‘thank you,’ after ten thousands of downloads, really appreciated.”

Got that? Ten thousand people downloaded this person’s photos, and I am the only person who donated a dime. And I’m too embarrassed to tell you how little I contributed. People think that if something is on the Internet, it should be free. Like no effort, no expertise, no craftsmanship went into it? What a crying shame for human beings created imago Dei. All that creativity and ingenuity is worth … nothing? If it’s in pixels then it didn’t require any work and needs no remuneration?

As a purveyor of mostly just pixels myself, I feel that photographer’s pain. And gratitude when people appreciate my pixels. Thank you for reading!