Because watching Ricki Lake give birth in a bathtub wasn’t enough, Lifetime announced yesterday that it’s ordered a new series called Born In The Wild, where pregnant women will give birth, unassisted, on TV. As the title implies, these natural births will be extra natural, because they will take place in a creek bed (or whatever), far from the corrupting influence of “hospitals” and “doctors,” but close enough for a camera crew to catch every excruciatingly painful detail. The series was inspired by an extremely graphic YouTube video of a woman giving birth outdoors that’s racked up over 20 million views, proving that clickability trumps centuries of scientific advancement every time.
Responding to allegations that it used to be common for women to die in childbirth, and now it’s not, and didn’t modern medicine have a little bit to do with that, Lifetime Senior VP and head of nonfiction programming Eli Lehrer tells Entertainment Weekly that trained emergency professionals will be on site for every birth, and the locations will be within “a certain radius” of nearby hospitals in case of complications. He adds that no first-time mothers will be allowed to participate on the show, and that subjects will all be people who were unsatisfied with their previous, hospital-bound birthing experiences.
“Our presence at these births is going to make them far safer than if they were doing it on their own,” Lehrer says, adding that it’s not his fault people believe everything they read on the Internet, and women used to drop a baby right there in the fields and go back to work, so everything will probably be fine.