Birth in all its grim glory: The Devil’s Whore, Cold Feet and Threads

Enough birth brickbats. Here are some bouquets.

1. The Devil’s Whore. Evaded charges of ludicrousness by omitting labour completely, instead showing us an exhausted Andrea Riseborough leaning back against bloodied sheets at the moment of delivery. Good yelling.
2. Fay Ripley in Cold Feet. Again, this looked convincingly fun-free.
3. The poor girl who gives birth to a deformed infant alone in a manky farmyard at the end of Threads. Conveys succinctly how terrible it would be to give birth in a post-apocalyptic world in which care of any kind, let alone from medical professionals, is no longer available.
   One of the fundamental functions of society is to look after and protect expectant mothers and newborns. That brutal conclusion told you there was no hope left, no prospective redemption, and no future; the damage done to the social contract was irreparable.

At my NCT class they told us that, left to our own devices on a desert island, we’d all manage to deliver our babies eventually. It was nice of them to try to make us feel confident. But it was also patently untrue.