The Big Push: Call the Midwife in Bangladesh

DHAKA, Jan. 20 (NsNewsWire) — More than 350,000 babies are born globally every day. Yet in many cultures it remains a mystical and deeply superstitious act. Now expertise from the UK’s TV hit Call the Midwife is helping people in Bangladesh to break the taboo and improve the health of mothers and babies.

Twenty-two-year-old Bimola is lying covered in robes on the floor of her home. She is surrounded by two women anxiously waiting to help her through the birth of her first child, reports BBC.

It is a tense moment and expectations are riding high.

“Cut, cut, cut!” The crew pause and prepare to shoot the scene again.

Bimola, played by actress Joyeeta Mahalanobish, is a character in the Bangladeshi TV drama, Ujan Ganger Naiya.

And the series, which translates as Sailing against the Tide, is the first in the country to realistically depict a woman going through labour.

This was a leap of faith in a conservative culture where childbirth is rarely openly discussed.

Even in the face of a very obvious bump, a woman will often not be asked about her pregnancy by anyone except a few very close female relatives.

So such scenes risked leaving the audience red-faced and reaching for the remote.

However, some of the reaction has been quite the opposite.

“The labour scene could be sensitive for older people who think men shouldn’t know about it,” says a young father in Barisal district of Southern Bangladesh.

“But I think it should be shared with everyone.”