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Modern birth trauma is too real to enjoy this fantasy version of childbirth gone wrong.
I felt my body starting to shake and tears welling up. “I don’t want to watch this,” I squeaked out to my husband. “Turn it off.” As he fumbled to pull up the remote on his phone, I urged, “You need to turn it off NOW.”
After a long weekend of parenting, we had just gotten our preschooler and toddler to bed and were settled in to watch the much-anticipated premiere of the new Game of Thrones prequel series, House of the Dragon, on Sunday. I’m not naive: I know any George R.R. Martin show is going to have plenty of gore to go along with its convoluted geopolitical plotlines. But the pivotal scene in the premiere features such ghastly obstetric violence that it left me reeling, and I know I’m not alone.
Without going into too much detail, the scene in question features a laboring Queen Aemma, whose baby is stuck in the breech position. To save the baby, the Maester suggests a cesarean section, which is then performed without consent from the queen, who is conscious throughout. Both the queen and baby die. The scene is excruciatingly violent, and Sian Brooke, who plays the queen, is convincingly terrified throughout.
“I physically held my mouth closed as tears poured down my face,” my friend Lauren told me about her reaction to watching the scene. We were texting late on Sunday, trying to process what we had just seen. Only 17 months removed from her own traumatic birthing experience, Lauren noted, “Stranger Things edited in a content warning because they premiered so close after the Uvalde massacre. But this [premiere] had nothing, when women since the beginning of time have had difficult births. Women remain so incredibly and astoundingly unconsidered.”
My own births were far from traumatic, but I still found myself unable to watch the scene. Just like Queen Aemma, my first son was a breech baby. Luckily, I had access to modern medicine and anesthesia and had a supportive husband who wasn’t planning to sacrifice me in order to gain an heir to his throne. Still, the memories that bubble up from my planned c-section would probably make the all-male creative team from House of the Dragon shiver. I’ll never forget the feeling of being wide awake during an invasive surgery; feeling the doctors tug the baby out of my abdomen (spinal anesthesia blocks pain but not feelings of pressure); and the poorly placed suction bucket that was right in my line of sight, where I could see my own blood filling up inch by inch.
And I describe my c-section as “calm and lovely” when anyone asks. Now, just imagine how someone who underwent an emergency c-section, after hours of fruitless labor, would feel after watching House of the Dragon.
As the co-host of a pregnancy podcast, I felt compelled to warn my listeners about this scene in my latest episode. I was a little too late for some. “I genuinely wish I had this warning before watching it, as I’m scheduled for a c-section in 32 days,” said Diana, a mom from Alaska. Other listeners expressed gratitude. “Thank you so much for sharing!” Kayla commented from her home in Alabama. “We were planning on watching it tonight, but I’ll have to pass after having a pretty traumatic birth with my first child, and I’m 13 weeks pregnant with baby No. 2!”
The creators of the show, meanwhile, are defending the scene. “There’s this whole idea in Game of Thrones, or in the Middle Ages, or in a historical age like this, that the men marched off to the battlefield and the women’s battlefield happened in the child bed,” showrunner Ryan J. Condal told Vanity Fair. “That was a very dangerous place to be. All of the complications that people go through in modern birth that are now fixed by science and medicine and surgery were not really possible back then.” Miguel Sapochnik, Condal’s fellow showrunner and the director of the episode, explained his reasoning for the scene in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “We felt that was an interesting way to explore the fact that for a woman in medieval times, giving birth was violence. It’s as dangerous as it gets.”
What Condal and Sapochnik fail to recognize is that childbirth is still an incredibly dangerous situation. To claim that modern medicine has fixed “all of the complications” demonstrates a breathtaking ignorance about pregnancy and childbirth. To think that the violence of birth disappeared with jousting tournaments and the feudal system shows that they’ve never had to contemplate how to extract an 8-pound baby from their midsection.
Childbirth is still inherently violent and dangerous, especially in America. The United States has the worst maternal mortality rate of any wealthy nation, and if you’re Black or Indigenous, your risk of death is two to three times higher than if you’re white and pregnant. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, preeclampsia, a life-threatening increase in blood pressure during pregnancy, has become more common and severe. Even if you avoid those deadly complications, more than 85 percent of birthing parents end up with perineal trauma, with 10 percent having a third-degree tear.
So, before anyone dismisses us as overly delicate for wanting a content warning on this episode, remember that this blood and violence is anything but hypothetical. And now with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many people are facing the prospect of forced birth. Right now, there are women enduring unwanted pregnancies because their access to safe and legal abortion has been taken away in some states.
I’m not saying the episode should be taken down or even revised. I understand and respect the show’s desire to create a powerful and moving scene. George R.R. Martin says, “I want to live the book. I want to be there. I want my emotions engaged.” And in that respect, the scene works. Our emotions are more than engaged. But some of us are exhausted parents trying to survive and heal our own trauma. Give us a little heads-up, and let us decide whether this is something we can handle.
Laura Birek the co-host of the pregnancy and parenting podcast Big Fat Positive. She's written for the L.A. Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Parents Magazine and more.
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