'Call the Midwife' Recap: Season 15 Episode 1

Call the Midwife premieres Sundays at 7:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream for a limited time. Recap the previous and following episodes and other seasons.
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Women’s liberation is in full swing, and not even pregnancies and children will stop some feminists from embracing it, as Rosalind finds out after delivering a baby girl to Maxine Drummond. When Rosalind returns to Maxine’s for a check-up, she ends up sitting in on a meeting about an upcoming march and strike, in which women will stop doing “women’s work” to show men everything they do everyday. 

Rosalind is intrigued by the ideas and comes away with reading material: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. The other midwives are also interested, especially in the cross-class nature of the feminist movement, which brings together working class cleaners like Maxine with educated women. Rosalind asks Nurse Crane to join her and the other younger midwives in the strike – and in burning a bra – but the older woman is somewhat skeptical, even if she agrees with the premise. 

She’s wary of showy gestures instead of solid action, as she tells the similarly aged Miss Higgins. She’s surprised to find Higgins is also reading The Female Eunuch. Higgins wonders if she and Nurse Crane are simply afraid of things passing them by: for instance, Higgins recently saw and liked a psychedelic shirt but thought to herself that she would never wear it. Nurse Crane realizes she has no good reason to object to the strike. 

Of course there are still babies to be had and families to care for as all this thought goes into women’s liberation. Sister Catherine has passed her exams to become a fully qualified midwife, and is assigned to the young Thelma Cutler, who has debilitating and constant nausea even though she’s six months pregnant. There’s no medication to treat such sickness after thalidomide was banned due to its devastating effects on children.

The constant nausea is taking a toll both physically and mentally. Sister Catherine is there when Thelma tries to go to the bathroom – and miscarries into the toilet. Sister Catherine rushes the body away before Thelma sees – and then the infant cries. Sister Catherine runs it to the maternity home, which is nearby, gasping once she arrives for someone to go help Thelma. The baby boy is rushed to a hospital that has experience with premature babies. 

Sister Catherine is traumatized, telling Sister Monica Joan that she doesn’t know how to help the baby boy. But the older sister tells her she can still help his mother. 

Indeed, Thelma cries when she first sees her baby in an incubator; she feels like she failed him and blames herself for his early delivery. She doesn’t know how to navigate decisions for the infant, who might survive with brain damage or blindness. Is it even worth giving him a tracheotomy?

The Kingsleys don’t seem to be thinking as deeply about their children’s well-being. Nurse Crane visits them in their squalid home, which lacks hot water, to check on the father’s diabetes, only to find that Edna is expecting another child while her young children are lice-ridden, under-supervised, and not in school as they should be. Edna has been diagnosed with depression, and their first child died, although the Poplar nurses don’t know how, since the Kingsleys lived elsewhere at the time.

Joyce returns to the Kingsleys for another check and finds the parents asleep while the children are so hungry that one is playing with saccharine tablets that are for her father’s diabetes. Joyce decides to take the children to a cleansing station for lice, ending up instead at Nonnatus when she finds the station closed.

While bathing the children, she finds bruises and possible cigarette burns. The midwives try to prevent their father from entering when he arrives furious, but he storms in and demands that his wife Edna grab their kids to bring them home.

Sister Veronica goes to the Kingsleys again with Cyril in his capacity as a social worker. Edna makes sure to show she is cooking her children a meal. When she goes in for a check-up on her pregnancy, she insists on a home birth despite Dr. Turner’s recommendation.

Cyril finally receives the case files on the Kingsleys’ deceased son. He died from oxygen deprivation supposedly caused by a seizure, but only his parents witnessed it. He, too, had bruises and cigarette burns. The parents lost their children for six months after that, but no charges were ever filed against them.

When one of the Kingsley children falls out of their home’s windows with low blood sugar and prescription drugs in her system – perhaps fed them to make her compliant – Sister Veronica and Cyril return to the Kingsleys with the police. The parents are arrested; Edna cries out that she has already lost one child.

And she brings another into the world in prison, refusing to go to the hospital and demanding a midwife when labor begins. Nurse Crane delivers a girl as Edna worries about her being taken away and then promises to give her a good life. The baby is taken away from her.

Sister Veronica meets with her friend, Trixie’s brother Geoffrey, and tells her that the case has strongly affected her. She asks him to call her Beryl, her real name, and says that she wants to have her own child before it’s impossible for her to do so. 

If Sister Veronica is considering giving up being a nun, it fits into new guidelines at national health. In a few years, the midwives will all be considered employees of the government – and won’t be allowed to wear their habits. Sister Julienne will have to decide what to do.

The Cutlers have a brighter future than the Kingsleys. Sister Catherine meets another mother on the premature baby ward whose daughter is going home after 14 months there. Sister Catherine asks her to speak to Thelma and her husband. Thelma decides to go forward with the tracheotomy.

Nurse Crane buys Miss Higgins a psychedelic shirt, and joins her and all the other women as they burn a bra before marching. The men all good-naturedly struggle to cook, clean, iron, and more in their absence.