Medical Aspects of ‘The Help’: The Plight of a Woman with Recurrent Miscarriages
Last weekend I saw The Help, a movie on race relations in Jackson, Mississippi 50 years ago with lingering implications for people who hire “help” to take care of their children and tend to their personal business anywhere in the world, including now. It’s a heavy-handed, simple-message and nonetheless very enjoyable film, with fine acting and imagery, based on the book of the same title by Katherine Stockett.
One element of the narrative interested me from the medical perspective, having to do with the plight of a pale, thin and sexy young woman who’s marginalized by the white Jackson social elite. The character Celia, portrayed with flair by Jessica Chastain, lives, isolated, on an out-of-town plantation. She spends her days alone while her husband’s at work. The nominally proper women in town, while playing bridge and otherwise gathering, call her “white trash,” and she sometimes lives up to their prejudices by drinking too much and behaving erratically.
It turns out the young woman’s having a hard time because she’s unable to bear children. She feels inadequate and fears her husband might leave her if he found out. Her history of recurrent miscarriages is discovered by the African American maid, Minny, who comes to work with her. In a revealing scene Minny finds Celia locked in the bathroom, severely bleeding from a miscarriage and crying. The maid, played with conviction by Octavia Spencer, helps her to recover, clean up, and bury the fetus in a shoebox in the yard, nearby three other small burial sites. With this, the young woman’s odd behavior becomes comprehensible.
I couldn’t help but think of countless women of earlier eras, and friends I’ve known in my adulthood, and women I’ve treated as a physician, who felt really bad about their inability to bear children. These days, with fertility treatments and work-ups for miscarriages so prevalent in communities like mine, we don’t see so many cases like Celia’s. It used to be a common problem, and it still is in many regions in the U.S and certainly in other parts of the world, for women who have difficulty conceiving or carrying babies to term, not just to not have children, but to become sad, and feel inadequate about themselves as women.
The Help is a worthwhile film at many levels, with fine acting, a good, PC message and story. I hope movie-goers will take special note of Celia’s predicament.
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