This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Bobby G: Aw, rats. I thought I restored this page using Google's cache [1]
, but now it's checked out by me, and I can't unlock it or edit it. I don't know why chose to restore this, of all pages, anyway, but it should be as follows:
A Pregnancy Trope - essentially, if the mother's water breaks, she's giving birth right there, right then. Bonus points if 'right there' is somewhere extremely cramped, uncomfortable or inaccessible (say, an elevator) and 'right then' is a point in time that it is extremely inconvenient for her to be giving birth at (such as when the aforementioned elevator has {{Trapped In A Fridge stopped working}]). Other variants include the back of cars (taxis are quite popular for this purpose). Inevitably leads to a Screaming Birth performed by someone with no medical training whatsoever.
A Truth in Television - when a mother's water breaks, it often indicates that labour has started and that the baby is on the way, and this can be quite a quick process; however, the instant birth part happens more often than television than it does in real life.
Examples:
- Almost every Sitcom featuring a pregnancy that you've ever seen:
- Friends
- Frasier, particularly Daphne's birth.
- Everybody Loves Raymond, in the back of Robbie's police car. Only it was a false start, and Robbie had started to go through his emergency birth procedures, much to Ray's chagrin.
- Subverted on Angel during Darla's pregnancy storyline; she goes into labour at the end of one episode, but it's not until the end of another episode that the baby's born.
- In Children of Men the birth begins not long after the water breaks, but on the other hand, the birth had been delayed for some time.
- Real life example: The best friend of this editor's mother had two children. Each labor lasted less than forty-five minutes. The first of the two nearly did deliver in a taxicab.
The index markup for this was Pregnancy Tropes.
