With its torrents of blood, animal howling, vagina hilarity and creepy relish in terms such as “cord prolapse”, “ovarian torsion”, “placental abruption”, the television adaptation of Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt has not pleased everyone.
Yet if some of us were unlikely to enjoy pleasantries such as Kay’s “same shit, different vagina”, with others finding its scenes of chaotic maternity staff and mashed innards actively disturbing, you could also see this ugliness as a potentially helpful corrective to enduring, often officially encouraged myths about the desirability of all-natural deliveries. This tendency probably contributed to tragedies like those at first hushed up at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust. Only the intervention of bereaved mothers, as the BBC’s Panorama has reported, brought the hospital’s avoidable fatalities to light. The senior midwife, Donna Ockenden, who will soon publish her final report on the scandal, has previously told Panorama about the maternity unit’s pride in its low-intervention births. “Low caesarean section rates were a prize.”
