Die Hebamme - Auf Leben und Tod (2010)

Around 1813, the widowed midwife Rosa Koelbl lives with her younger sister Anna in a Tyrolean mountain village. As Rosa helps the farmer’s wife, Mrs. Bachler, give birth to her eighth child—almost against the woman’s will—the young physician Gennaro Kauner is visiting the village priest. It quickly becomes clear that Rosa shares many of the young doctor’s views, which are considered enlightened for the time. One of these is the idea, shared by the doctor and his superior, the medical councillor, of establishing a maternity hospital where women can give birth in peace and under far more hygienic conditions than in the village or the city’s poor quarters. Soon afterward, Rosa learns that her sister Anna is pregnant by Karl Bachler, a young farmer whose farm Anna works on as a maid. When he refuses to acknowledge the child and marry Anna, she attempts suicide. Rosa and the young doctor manage to save her at the last moment. As a result, Rosa decides to go with him and her sister to the city, where the doctor works at the maternity hospital established by the university. Rosa begins working there as a midwife and an instructor for young midwives. Medical students are also taught obstetrics there. Anna, too, is to give birth to her child there. Rosa soon achieves good results with her progressive, unconventional methods. Several cases of severe puerperal fever—which the women survive only thanks to the devoted care of Rosa and her pupils—lead her to suspect a connection with the stagnant holy water that the Church insists be used in the womb for emergency baptisms during complicated deliveries. She shares these thoughts with the doctor, but although he is an atheist, he does not investigate the connection further, for fear of conflict with the state and the Church. Before long, Rosa and the physician grow closer, but that does not stop him from insisting on his primacy in medical opinions and duties, despite her repeated successes in treating and supporting women during childbirth. In the case of the young Martha, the doctor performs a Caesarean section, during which the mother dies and the child survives. Since Martha is not the first woman to die after a Caesarean performed by the physician, Rosa reports the incident to the university’s medical councillor, who oversees the maternity hospital, and demands an autopsy. Rosa does not take Martha’s child to the foundling home because she is convinced it would not survive even a week there. She gets help from a woman whose most recent delivery she had attended; the woman takes the child in along with her own five children. Because it is a criminal offense not to take the orphan to the foundling home, Rosa flees from the police and returns to her village with Anna, who is heavily pregnant. In their absence, their older sister has sold the inherited house. Rosa and Anna find refuge with Rosa’s older friend Kathi, from whom Rosa learns that Maria, the farmer’s wife Pachler, whose delivery she had attended, has since died. Meanwhile, the autopsy of Martha, who died from the consequences of the Caesarean, establishes that the doctor measured her pelvis incorrectly and that the operation was unwarranted. However, the medical councillor protects his colleague from losing his license. In the village, Rosa becomes increasingly of an outsider, especially among the men, whose reactionary views are also supported by the priest. Nevertheless, she continues to stand up for women, for example when they are abused by their husbands. During the church fair, the villagers shun Rosa because farmer Pachler blames her for his wife’s death. The doctor comes to visit and admits his medical error. He offers to take her with him to Vienna, where he has since been appointed. In the middle of their conversation, Rosa is called to her sister Anna, whose labor has begun. It is a difficult delivery, and the village women pray for the lives of both mother and child. The priest appears and again insists on an emergency baptism in the middle of the delivery. Rosa initially refuses, whereupon the priest tries to put pressure on the physician as well. At last, Rosa says the baptismal formula, but does not administer the holy water as an enema through the birth canal—a serious offense under the Catholic law of the time. In the end credits, viewers learn that Rosa is sentenced to three years in prison for child abduction and also loses her license as a midwife because of her “misconduct” during the emergency baptism.