When I first wrote about Call the Midwife in 2019, the popular PBS drama dealt with abortion. Looking back, that episode which opened the show’s eighth season, certainly was prescient. In 1964, a woman dies after having a back alley abortion. Legal abortions weren’t available in Great Britain until 1967 and in the U.S., abortion became legal after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In 2022, in the Dobbs decision, a conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe removing the federal protection for abortion. Since then, 19 states have passed legislation banning or limiting access to abortion and maternal mortality is on the rise.
Jill Trottwood (Joanna Horton), Andrew Trottwood (Teddy Berriman) and Shelagh Turner (Laura Main) Credit: PBS
Another plot line in the eighth season focused on a measles epidemic and a vaccination trial that was being resisted by many skeptical parents. Fast forward to Call the Midwife’s fourteenth season set in 1970. The measles vaccine is now available, but still meeting with objections from some parents. Something happens that turns the situation around. A single mother, Jill Trottwood (played by Joanna Horton), becomes a passionate promoter for the vaccine. Jill’s son, Andrew, became ill with measles and suffered a brain infection that has left him disabled. Jill positions herself outside a school, Andrew in a wheelchair, and when parents and their children leave, she hands out flyers about the vaccine. She tells parents that Andrew had measles before the vaccine was available and urges them to protect their children. Soon, a long line forms outside the clinic.
Harry Chopra (Eisa Latif), Betty Desmond (Sophie Bould), Dr. Patrick Turner (Stephen McGann), and Owen Desmond (Ben Owen-Jones)
In that same episode, Dr. Patrick Turner (Stephen McGann) visits Owen Desmond who contracted polio and is now paralyzed and needs an iron lung to help him breathe. Like Andrew, Owen was stricken with a devastating disease before a vaccine was available. An iron lung now defines his life.
Call the Midwife is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, a British nurse who lived and worked with a community of Anglican nuns in the poverty-plagued East End of London in the 1950s. The first season opened in the year 1957 and the series has worked its way through the 1960s, a time period which saw many political and cultural revolutions. The nuns and midwives who live in Nonnatus House in the small town of Poplar, strive to provide quality health care for pregnant women and their babies, but often find themselves tending to other family members.
Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter)
Heidi Thomas, who created and writes the series, manages to craft story lines which confront controversial topics without seeming heavy handed. She puts a face to these conflicts, bringing us inside the lives of people who are struggling to provide for their families while trying to make sense of a world that is rapidly changing.
Misinformation about vaccines, being spread by Robert Kennedy, Jr., a controversial and dangerous choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, is turning back the clock to a time we thought we had relegated to the history books. Diseases like measles and polio, once eradicated because of vaccines, are now threatening children’s lives. So far this year, there are more than 1,000 cases of measles, the second worse epidemic since the illness was declared eliminated more than a half century ago. Rather than encourage parents to vaccinate their children, Kennedy is directing HHS to find treatments. Fact: there is no treatment for this easily spread virus. The best weapon is the vaccine.
Baby Boomers are perhaps the only people alive today who remember outbreaks of measles and polio. When I was a child, I had measles. Let me tell you, it’s a terrible disease. My body was covered with an angry red rash. My mother isolated me in a dark room. Because my eyes hurt, I wore sunglasses. I had terrible headaches, a fever, chills, and body aches. Each time my mother checked on me, I could see the fear on her face.
Fortunately, I survived, as did my sister and brother. And as soon as the measles vaccine was available, my parents took us to get the shot. We had already had the polio vaccine, my mother being alarmed by all those depictions of people in iron lungs. Before the polio vaccine, the disease paralyzed more than 15,000 people each year in the U.S. While there have been no cases reported in the U.S. – yet – cases have been reported in Pakistan and Afghanistan. If vaccinations rates in the U.S. drop, will we also see a resurgence of polio in our communities? It’s something too terrible to think about.
What can convince vaccine-hesitant parents to get their children vaccinated? In February, an unvaccinated school-aged girl in West Texas became the first U.S death from measles in a decade. Her father told a New York Times reporter that, despite his daughter’s death, he would still not get his other children vaccinated. We are in sad and very dangerous times.
Top: Call the Midwife Series – Shelagh Turner (Laura Main), Dr. Turner (Stephen McGann), and Violet Buckle (Annabelle Apsion). Credit: PBS
