Pregnancy isn’t a plot device
In one episode of Star Trek,1 the transporter chief’s wife Keiko is pregnant.2 It’s a very sudden move from the episode only a few turns back where they were getting married, from Data’s wrestling with the idea of letting friends ignore his perfectly-honed advice. Some drama and some android antics and it all ended well, as it should have, with a wedding, but only a few episodes later you find out she is pregnant, and wonder—has it really been nine months since that wedding episode, or was she really afraid to get married because her nervous system was already raging with that prenatal pizzazz and making her rethink her whole life? Anyway, in this episode she’s pregnant, and some alien terrorists come aboard the ship and take her conveniently hostage, a la Die Hard—and I say conveniently because she ends up giving birth in 10-Forward with Worf as her midwife. You’ll say none of that sounds very convenient at all, and I’d have to agree, but apparently TV producers everywhere have decided you and I are whackadoodles for thinking it’s odd that every pregnant woman in media always becomes so at the most cinematic of moments, and the baby always decides to come out at the wrong time, regardless of her blood pressure levels or age or fitness level. All those execs in their wrinkled suit jackets think a pregnancy is pretty darn convenient, for the ratings and the thrills. And after all that drama where Keiko gives birth in the starlit nightclub of the Enterprise surrounded by space pirates, you’ll hardly hear anything about the baby, because the baby was really only invented to make a hostage situation more dramatic. So really it was no trouble at all, no inconvenience.
And it’s okay really, to imagine those things happening and put them on TV, because for one thing it’s interesting, and also—isn’t life just like that sometimes? But it occurs to me that for most of us life is full of the mundane and normal, and for the women living out here in the real world a pregnancy takes longer than two or three episodes and it involves a real mother and a real baby, and the consequences of it are somehow messier and less messy than what we see on TV, and it changes absolutely everything about the world simply by its occurrence. No hostage situation necessary.
Don’t come at me, I love Star Trek and have sufficient respect for its charm and brilliance. heart of this poem is true for pretty much any modern American media depiction of pregnancy and childbirth.
You may gather from this reference that I am talking about Star Trek: the Next Generation. It’s true. I only write poems inspired by the best Star Trek series. Wait, wasn’t I trying to prevent a fight in the last footnote? Oops.
Plenty of fun, though nothing I read suggested a "poem" but rather a provocative meditation.