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Some of the saddest medical storylines involve pregnancy complications, but does Chicago Med overuse the death-in-childbirth trope?
Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 3 featured a heartbreaking story in which a mother died of a massive bleed soon after giving birth.
It was an emotional storyline, but it’s hard not to get desensitized when the medical drama uses this trope so often.
Chicago Med Used This Type Of Story Two Weeks In A Row
While it wasn’t exactly the death-in-childbirth trope, Chicago Med gave us another story with a dying mother just a week before Eloise died.
The story in Chicago Med Season 10 Episode 2 revolved around a pregnant woman with schizophrenia who stopped taking her medication because she was afraid it would harm her baby.
This could have been a strong mental health storyline, but the woman and her husband were in denial that she was having hallucinations and other symptoms of her disease, and the episode ended with her in critical condition after a car accident caused by her psychosis.
Then, without giving the audience any time to recover, Med threw Hannah into a storyline where a pregnant woman didn’t trust her because other doctors hadn’t taken her seriously, only for the woman to die immediately after giving birth.
Even if Med doesn’t ALWAYS make pregnant mothers die, having those stories so close together makes it seem like it.
No wonder some viewers felt annoyed or manipulated instead of heartbroken by Eloise’s death!
These Stories Are Important, So Med Shouldn’t Overdo Them
It’s hard to fault Med for wanting to shine a light on the social justice issue of Black women having worse maternal death rates because of being taken less seriously by doctors.
But Eloise’s death wasn’t a shocking plot twist when Med does this all the time.
The overuse of the death-in-childbirth trope blunted the emotional impact this story was supposed to make, especially considering that the major fallout from Eloise’s death revolved around a white doctor’s difficulty not blaming herself for it.
To be clear, Hannah is a major character, and her mental health issue is a compelling story. I’m not saying she shouldn’t struggle with Eloise’s death or have meaningful stories.
However, Med needs to think about the message it sends by having so many women die in childbirth and centering Hannah’s reaction to this one.
Hannah has been the OBGYN on staff since Season 6, so it’s understandable that there have been many stories involving pregnancies.
She deserves as many front-burner stories as other doctors on staff, and it’s especially important to center women’s reproductive health during a time when abortion access has become a divisive political issue.
However, that doesn’t mean that the majority of her stories have to involve the death-in-childbirth trope or women with high-risk pregnancies.
Mothers dying after giving birth has become a tired TV trope on Chicago Med, which is desensitizing and boring the audience, so it’s time to switch things up.
For one thing, reproductive health care involves a lot more than women who have serious complications during pregnancy.
There are reproductive health issues that have nothing to do with pregnancy, such as screenings and treatment for cervical and uterine cancer, encouraging parents to give their teenage daughters the HPV vaccine, or handling bleeding caused by uterine fibroids.
As a transgender man who had a serious issue because of that last one, I’d love a story in which Hannah treats a transgender man for something usually classified as a women’s health issue.
That would be a more original story than the thousandth death-in-childbirth trope and provide more LGBTQ+ representation on TV, so it would be a win-win.
Even if Chicago Med wants to do more pregnancy stories, they don’t have to be about high-risk pregnancies that end in death.
There are plenty of people who have a hard time conceiving and need IVF or similar procedures to get pregnant, women carrying multiple babies, and teenagers who need to obtain birth control.
Why not throw 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 been on staff at Gaffney since Chicago Med’s sixth season, but what about the five seasons before that?
It’s hard to remember storylines that took place half a decade ago or longer, but the ones that stick out in my mind involved high-risk pregnancies, even if some of them had happier endings.
The most memorable pre-Hannah pregnancy storyline took place in Season 2, and it involved a supposedly comatose woman who had somehow gotten pregnant.
During the course of this story, doctors encouraged the woman’s parents, who were her healthcare proxies, to consent to an abortion because of her medical condition.
I remember that the parents didn’t want to and that, eventually, the doctors discovered this woman wasn’t in a coma, but I don’t remember what happened to the baby.
I guess that counts as a pregnancy story that didn’t involve the death-in-childbirth trope, but it also didn’t center on the pregnancy.
The point of the story was that the woman had a rare condition called locked-in syndrome that doctors mistook for a coma.
Other early episodes included a woman who was willing to die during a high-risk pregnancy so that she could give her daughter a bone marrow donor (similar to something that once happened on Days of Our Lives) and a woman at risk of dying before her baby could be born because she wasn’t eating enough.
There may have been some more positive pregnancy stories scattered through the seasons, but the fact that I can’t think of any offhand is a problem.
After a decade of such stories, surely Chicago Med can think of something else for Hannah to do so that we don’t get the same old thing week after week!
Over to you, Chicago Med fanatics.
What do you think of how often Med uses the death-in-childbirth trope?
Hit the comments with your thoughts!
Chicago Med airs on NBC on Wednesdays at 8/7c and on Peacock on Thursdays.
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