Out Giving Birth; Back in Two Minutes
The opposite of Screaming Birth. When a show wants to avoid graphic details and a screaming woman pushing a child through her pelvis, such as in a children's show or in a comedy (sometimes for humor, sometimes to avoid wasting airtime on something unfunny), a birth becomes a simple as going to the hospital and popping out the kid like a PEZ candy. Sometimes, the hospital isn't even necessary.
Rarely Truth in Television, though every once in a while childbirth is relatively quick and painless. While the shortest recorded time for an American woman in labor in the last hundred years with both the child and the mother surviving is 23 minutes, the national average is just over six hours of labor. In cases of extremely short labor, there are typically complications of varying severity that cause or result from the unexpectedly simple and quick situation.
This trope applies to practically any birth that is neither human nor equine.
Often results in Born in an Elevator, though that trope is usually accompanied by a Screaming Birth and should be added to the appropriate page.
Film
- In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, a woman gives birth while standing at a sink, washing the dishes.
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Woman (glances down, then asides to one of her other children): "Could you get that for me, dear?" |
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- Almost the exact same joke was used on Family Guy.
- In The House Bunny, there is a girl who is pregnant, and towards the end, the sorority is fighting for recognition. The pregnant girl is wheeled back in still in her hospital bed, with a baby wrapped in a pink blanket. (Which is counted as a member of the sorority.)
- In Cry-Baby, Pepper Walker gives birth in the back seat of a car that is in the middle of a game of high-speed chicken. The whole thing takes about three minutes to resolve.
- In "Arsenic and Old Lace", Officer O'Hara mentions that his mother, a stage actress, gave birth to him in the dressing room at the end of the second act, and then made the finale.
Literature
- Rudyard Kipling cites this trope in The Three-Decker
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We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came |
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Live-Action TV
- In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Child". this is justified by the fact that Troi's pregnancy is the result of the manifestation of a powerful energy being. Also acknowledged in-universe.
Oral Tradition, Myths and Legends
- Irish pirate queen Grace O'Malley reputedly had a baby belowdecks during combat, and still managed to join the fight not long after, pistol in hand, and screaming at her crew (and opponents) to "keep quiet, or you'll wake the baby."
Video Games
- A female dwarf in Dwarf Fortress will give birth in the middle of a task, pick up the baby and go right back to what she was doing.
- Not quite a straight example on account of DF suffering from a fairly extreme case of Video Game Time.
Western Animation
- Used in the Futurama episode The Luck of the Fryish, subverting Screaming Birth where Fry's mother turns out to be screaming at the sports game on the radio.
Real Life
- Female horses are known as the birth-giving queens of the whole animal kingdom, or at least among the animals most people know. There's a saying that goes, "A watched mare never foals," and most horse breeders will agree with this. The minute you leave the mare alone is the minute the foal will hit the ground.
- It's said that sometimes plow mares would just give birth, still in harness, during lunch and be back to plowing right on schedule.
- Invoked by Bill Maher, who implied that China was closer to seeing birth this way than the US was.
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