• Flight attendants “delivered” Chinese baby born on plane

    Date: 2012.01.04 | Category: In the news | Tags: ,,

    Media from all over the world have been writing about a baby born in midair, on a plane between Sichuan Province and Wuhan. Feng Yu, 23, and her husband boarded the plane after a doctor told her that her baby wouldn’t be born for another two weeks. Apparently, the woman passed security checks despite not being allowed to fly during the first trimester, because she was thin and wore heavy clothes. Now, here goes the story of the “brave” flight attendants who “delivered” this woman’s baby.

    Zuo Lei, the purser of the flight, told the press: ”I was frightened when the baby’s head came out but the body was still stuck. … I asked myself to calm down and firmly held the woman’s hand and tried hard to recall what I had learned from emergency training.”

    Later on, she says that she shouted “one, two, three, breathe in,” and “one, two, three, breathe out”, as a handbook they had instructed the flight attendants to do. Isn’t it a little puzzling that these flight attendants — who must definitely have been frightened and were trying to help in this unusual situation — were “credited” with delivering the baby? After all, what did they do? The woman quoted held the laboring mother’s hand because she needed to calm down?

    It is a shame that laboring women are portrayed as helpless creatures with no active involvement in their labors and births. It is a shame that society thinks that just about anyone is more qualified to “deliver a baby” than the laboring mother herself, including flight attendants, cab drivers, firefighters, neighbors, and random passers-by. Stories like these, which crop up every so often, do their fair share to perpetuate that myth.