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She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on--lived to have six children more--to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself.
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Parental Abandonment occurs with an overwhelming frequency in fiction. On top of that, an overwhelming number of victims lose their mothers during childbirth. So sad, so tragic, so heart-wrenching... such a goldmine for a plot device. Nothing impossible about it, but the statistics are ridiculously high, especially for any industrialized nations. Although, as Jane Austen observed, it wasn't used ridiculously often even before modern medicine.)
May be used to set up a tense family situation where the father, older siblings or grandparents unreasonably blame the youngest for "murdering Mother" and turn him/her into The Unfavourite. On the other hand, the contrary can also happen: the father and/or siblings decide that their mom's death shall not be in vain and therefore they do their best to take care of the youngest — though whether they actually do their best at child rearing is something else.
Can double as Death by Sex for a particularly Anvilicious Aesop. Often used in Fan Fiction for shows where Parental Abandonment is never explained.
Very often a Truth in Television for at least 70% of the world's population. According to the UNFPA in 2005, while the lifetime risk of maternal death for people in 'developed regions' is 1 in 7300, the average worldwide is 1 in 92, rising as high as 1 in 22 women for Sub-Saharan Africa (source). Note that the per-pregnancy risk is lower, since many of these cultures also have high birth rates, since they also tend to have high infant mortality rates. Additionally, the rates of maternal deaths are on the rise in the United States due to a variety of reasons, including lack of access to care in some regions (source).
In fact the use of it as a plot device might be Older Than Feudalism, since unless his mother died in childbirth, the protagonist could be burdened with at least six siblings.
See Her Heart Will Go On, the sort-of inversion of this—he dies, she lives.
Incidentally, dying in childbirth is no fun at all. Stories that neglect to mention fever, screaming, blood, and agony that lasts hours or even days... were probably written by the childless or by those with no medical knowledge. A few examples are included here. It should be noted that some deaths in childbirth do occur much more quickly than that — a woman with uterine atony can hemorrhage to death in minutes without emergency medical intervention. But many stories have the doomed mother live just long enough to say her last words; either a whispered goodbye to her husband or an apology to her child, or a request to whoever's with her to tell her family she loved them. Finally, a shot of her pale, limp, delicate hand slipping from the grasp of whoever's holding it.
If the baby's in danger too, the couple will be tasked with the heartbreaking decision of whether to save the baby or the mother. More often than not the decision leads to this trope, at the mother's behest.
May be a set up for the Wicked Stepmother or Promotion to Parent. If someone other than the mother or baby dies, it's Birth-Death Juxtaposition.
As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Fairy Tales[]
- Fairy tales are fond of leaving children vulnerable to the Wicked Stepmother this way. Snow White may be the best known (once The Brothers Grimm bowdlerized to make the villainess the stepmother rather than the mother), but many others, such as "The Juniper Tree" invoke it. The English fairy tale "Tattercoats" (collected by Joseph Jacobs) has the heroine left vulnerable by her mother's death because her grandfather then blames her for it.
- Just an aside, Tanith Lee's novel length version of Snow White, White as Snow, leaves the mother as the villainess but her fate is much like the original story other than the fact that she didn't use a spell to age, she just aged naturally while her daughter was missing and presumed dead. Being virtually unknown to her daughter even when they lived together helped. It's a thing. Her short story version, Red as Blood, leaves the stepmother in place but Snow White herself is a vampire and the witch queen uses white magic and religious items to destroy her.
Music[]
- The Tim McGraw song "Don't Take the Girl" ends with the girl in question "fading fast" after a difficult childbirth. Her fate is left hanging, with the protagonist praying to God to take him instead.
- Country music in general is fond of this trope. (Well, dead wives in general, but especially this one.)
- The song Light of Day Day of Darkness by the doom metal band Green Carnation has both the death of the woman and the child in childbirth as a constant theme:
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Through Crimson eye, And shattered lie, Behold the sacrifice, Of innocent life |
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- Threatened in Willie's Lady. His mother, a rank witch, has enchanted his wife so she will never give birth, having been in labor for days. (Fortunately, Willie figures out how to undo the spell.)
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Of her young bairn she'll neer be lighter, |
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- In Leesom Brand, the lovers try to elope, but she goes into labor in the woods and dies with the baby.
- In Sheath and Knife, to conceal Brother-Sister Incest, the brother takes his sister to the woods to give birth, and she and the baby die.
- In The Death of Queen Jane, the queen is dying in childbirth and must implore them to perform a Caeserian section to save the baby. This would ensure her own death, but she succeeds.
- In some variants of Willie and Earl Richard's Daughter, the woman dies in childbirth, and the father must leave the living baby behind in hopes that the woman's father will get a nurse for it. He does.
- The Rake's Song involves a young woman who dies in the process of giving birth to her fourth child. Tragic, right? Think again. The humble narrator considers her death a blessing, and then proceeds to murder the rest of his children.
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Ugly Myfanwy died on delivery, mercifully taking her mother along. |
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- Stevie Wright's "Evie (part 3)"
- Live's song "Lightning Crashes" is about a woman who dies in childbirth, her daughter being adopted afterward.
- "May" by James Durbin:
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During birth I got my daughter, Jesus took away my May. |
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- The Music Video for Nickelback's "Lullaby", but the song is really about suicide.
Mythology[]
- Izanami, Shinto mother goddess, died giving birth to the fire god Kagutsuchi. Her husband Izanagi was so infuriated, he killed the newborn child (although its blood gave way to create numerous deities, such as Take-Mikazuchi). He tried rescuing his wife from the land of the dead, but she could not return to him and was now a deity of death, because of Izanagi fleeing from her and the ikusa and shikome she sent after him. She vowed to kill 500 people each day in the mortal world, to which Izanagi said he'd give life to 1500.
- Note that the death wasn't from the normal pain of giving birth, but from the burns that typically result in shoving a fire deity out of yourself.
Tabletop Games[]
- Women in the Pendragon RPG have an extremely high chance of suffering this; it's actually the most common cause of death, at least for female PCs. The system is also fairly misogynistic, reflecting many 'medieval values,' so childbirth is pretty much a female PC's main duty, unless they're very inventive with their character. At least one such PC made it her life's goal to avoid getting married and pregnant, just to avoid this.
- In a bit more metaphorical example of this trope, the creation of Slaanesh in Warhammer 40000 destroyed the Eldar civilization.
- The birth of a werefox in the Kitsune supplement for the old World of Darkness almost always causes this...sort of. For mystical reasons that are never completely explained, the birth of a Kitsune requires a sacrifice, so a non-Kitsune parent of a Kitsune has a 90% chance of dying when the child is born. Yes, this happens to fathers as well as mothers.
- The Weathermay-Foxgrove sisters, successors to Van Richten as Ravenloft's most widely-read occult scholars, lost their mother to this trope. Probably justified: even today, twin births are always considered high-risk, and medical care even in Mordent is 17th-century at best.
- Can happen in FATAL, although this can easily be because the Fetus Terrible is a sentient, raptophilic military fork just like its father.
- According to the Pathfinder supplement Blood of Fiends, this is why "Motherless" is a canonical slang term for qlippoth-tieflings.
Theatre[]
- Cruelly twisted in the play Long Day's Journey Into Night: Mary was severely injured during the youngest son, Edmund's, birth and got addicted to morphine to ease her physical pain. This is one of the many cruel, final insults James hurls at Edmund before the end of the play, and even he realizes he has gone too far in blaming him for that.
- Appears in the musical "Kristina", based on Vilhelm Moberg's "Emigrants" suite. Though in this case it is a miscarriage that leads to the death of Kristina.
- In Our Town, the final scene of the play is about Emily looking back on the town and her life after she dies in childbirth.
- Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande — much better known as an operatic adaption by Claude Debussy. The fey beauty Mélisande dies giving birth to a tiny little girl months after Pelléas has died at the hands of his love rival King Golaud, as the Older and Wiser King Arkel laments "now the child must live in her place: it's the poor little one's turn"
- Richard Wagner's operatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung has this in store for Sieglinde, who dies as she gives birth to the hero Siegfried, her child with her already dead twin brother Siegmund. Her sort-of "midwife", the dwarf Mime, takes baby Siegfried in.
- In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the disputed page boy's mother died in childbirth, which is why Titania's raising him.
Webcomics[]
- It's heavily implied that Sam's mother died from complications after childbirth in Cheer but Sam's father insists that she's not to blame.
- Kevin and Kell's Wanda Woolstone dies in childbirth giving birth to Corrie, which serves as a FreudianExcuse for her father Ralph to want to eat Kevin in order to spare his sister the same grief.
- The end of Anders Loves Maria.
- The Ciem Webcomic Series and succeeding books go for the inversion: Candi lives; Angie dies.
- Classic Gerosha: Angie exhausts her Life Energy to defeat Kimi's Psychic Powers.
- Comprehensive Gerosha: Angie is fatally injured and dies a few hours after birth because the house imploded during a bombing and fell on top of Candi. Kimi's clairvoyance is defeated by Angie's conception anyway.
- Thump Sharpley's mother in Everyday Heroes died during childbirth. Thump had to be rescued by c-section, but sustained a small amount of brain damage due to lack of oxygen.
- Gunnerkrigg Court offers a more protracted example. Antimony's mother Surma wasted away over a twelve-year period due to her non-human heritage forcing her to transfer her life-force to her daughter. This same fate awaits Antimony, should she have children.
Web Original[]
- In The Gamers Alliance, Viirsa gives birth to Kaisa and dies in her lover Hector's arms after being fatally wounded in the aftermath of the infiltration of Myridia during the Great War.
- The mother of the Fiametta triplets in Survival of the Fittest version 4, which sets up most of the trio's future emotional issues.
Western Animation[]
- In the ThunderCats (2011) episode "Native Son", a Flash Back reveals the Queen of Thundera died giving birth to the crown prince Lion-O. For her toddler son Tygra, who she and her king Claudius adopted after struggling to have a child, Lion-O's Royal Blood ensured he lost both his Mother and his chance at the throne at the same time; while he does love Lion-O like a brother and helps him out when needed, he has quite the issues regarding him too.
- Happened in Steven Universe, with Rose Quartz all but disappearing right after she gave birth to her half-gem and half-human child, the titular Steven. It's suggested that she's still more or less alive in him, however.