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Expectant mothers are too often treated as an inconvenience | Zoe Williams
The BBC’s new show This Is Going to Hurt is about overstretched doctors – but patronising pregnant women is a long-standing problem
It’s funny, isn’t it, childbirth? Periodically, someone says something true about whether or not it hurts (I won’t pick a side here), and there’s a flurry of panic that people will be put off doing it and that’ll be the end of the species. In real life, nobody has ever been discouraged from reproducing by its harsh realities, any more than Roy Orbison could deter you from falling in love. Pain is very abstract until it’s almost upon you, and by then it’s too late.
But that isn’t the main charge against This Is Going to Hurt, the BBC’s adaptation of former doctor Adam Kay’s ward diary. Rather, it’s that the series, and by inference the diaries themselves, lift the lid on the casual disrespect, bordering on misogyny, with which obstetricians treat mothers. This, again, is a hardy perennial. As a criticism of Kay, it’s way off: the system he describes is of doctors so overstretched as to leave you in awe.
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