Some of the saddest storylines in medicine involve pregnancy complications, but has Chicago Med overused the death-in-childbirth trope?
Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 3 tells the heartbreaking story of a mother who dies from a massive hemorrhage shortly after giving birth.
It’s an emotionally charged storyline, but it’s hard not to become insensitive when this medical drama uses this trope so often.
Chicago Med uses this type of story for two weeks in a row
While it’s not exactly a metaphor for childbirth death, just a week before Eloise’s death, Chicago Med told us another story about a dying mother.
Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 2 revolves around a pregnant woman with schizophrenia who stops taking her medication because she fears it will harm her baby.
This could have been a strong mental health storyline, but the woman and her husband denied that she was experiencing hallucinations and other symptoms of the illness, and the episode ended with her in critical condition following a car accident caused by her psychosis.
Mede then throws Hannah into a storyline without giving the audience any time to recover: a pregnant woman doesn’t trust her because other doctors don’t take her seriously, and the woman dies immediately after giving birth.
Even if medicine doesn’t always allow pregnant mothers to die, these stories are so closely tied together that it seems like it is.
No wonder some viewers felt annoyed or manipulated by Héloïse’s death rather than heartbroken!
These stories are important, so medicine shouldn’t exaggerate them
It’s hard to blame the medical community for wanting to shine a light on social justice issues for black women, who experience higher maternal mortality rates due to doctors taking them less seriously.
But Héloïse’s death isn’t a shocking plot twist when Mede does it all the time.
The overuse of the “death in childbirth” trope undermines the emotional impact this story is supposed to have, especially given that the primary consequence of Héloïse’s death is that it’s hard for a white doctor not to blame himself for it.
To be clear, Hannah is a main character and her mental health struggles make for a compelling story. I’m not saying she shouldn’t struggle with Héloïse’s death and have a meaningful story.
However, the medical community needs to consider the message it sent, allowing so many women to die in childbirth, and focus Hannah’s response on this incident.
Hannah has been an OB-GYN since season six, so it’s understandable that there are a lot of stories involving pregnancy.
She deserves access to many important stories like other doctors, and centering women’s reproductive health is especially important in an era when abortion has become a divisive political issue.
However, that doesn’t mean that most of her stories have to involve tropes of death in childbirth or women with high-risk pregnancies.
Postpartum mother death has become a tired television trope on Chicago Med that desensitizes and bores viewers, so it’s time to change that.
For one thing, reproductive health care involves more than just women who experience serious complications during pregnancy.
Some reproductive health issues are not related to pregnancy, such as screening and treatment for cervical and uterine cancer, encouraging parents to vaccinate their teenage daughters against HPV, or dealing with bleeding from uterine fibroids.
As a trans man who has serious issues with that last issue, I loved a story in which Hannah treats a trans man for issues that are typically classified as women’s health issues.
It would be a more original story than the 1,000th childbirth death trope and provide more LGBTQ+ representation on television, so it would be a win-win.
Even if Chicago Med wanted to cover more pregnancy stories, they wouldn’t necessarily be about high-risk pregnancies that resulted in death.
There are many people who have difficulty conceiving, who need in vitro fertilization or similar procedures to conceive, women who have multiple babies, and teenagers who need birth control.
Why not mix some of these stories into the mix to make things more interesting?
Did Chicago Med’s overuse of the “death in childbirth” trope predate Hannah’s introduction?
Hannah has only worked in Gaffney since Chicago Med’s sixth season, but what about the five seasons before that?
It’s hard to remember storylines that took place five years ago or more, but the ones that stick in my mind involve high-risk pregnancies, even if some of them have happier endings.
The most memorable Hannah pre-pregnancy storyline occurred in Season 2, which involved a woman who was supposedly in a coma but somehow became pregnant.
In the course of this story, doctors encourage the woman’s parents (her medical agents) to consent to an abortion because of her medical condition.
I remember the parents were reluctant and eventually the doctors found that the woman was not in a coma, but I don’t remember what happened to the baby.
I suppose this counts as a pregnancy story that doesn’t involve the trope of death in childbirth, but it doesn’t center on pregnancy either.
The gist of the story is that the woman suffered from a rare condition called locked-in syndrome, which doctors mistook her for coma.
Other early episodes include a woman willing to die during a high-risk pregnancy in order to provide a bone marrow donor for her daughter (similar to what once happened on Days of Our Lives) and a woman who was at risk of dying before her baby could will be born because she doesn’t eat enough.
There are probably some more positive pregnancy stories scattered throughout the seasons, but the fact that I can’t think of any off-the-cuff stories is a problem.
After a decade of stories like this, Chicago Med could definitely come up with something else for Hannah so we don’t end up with the same thing week after week!
Over to you, Chicago Med fanatics.
What are your thoughts on how often Med uses the “death in childbirth” metaphor?
Come to the comment area to express your thoughts!
Chicago Med airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on NBC and Thursdays on Peacock.
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