One contemporaneous English translation of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ writings on baptism (a topic that overlapped with medical ethics around birth because of the importance the church placed on it) contained the following line: “Whan the woman is feble and the child may noght comyn out, then it is better that the chylde be slayne than the moder of the child also dye.” “Of course the church was against abortion,” wrote Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “but it seems that at least in the context of Caesarean birth the question of a choice between the mother’s or the child’s life never arose.”
In fact, some writers offering guidance on the matter explicitly recommended the opposite. And historian Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, who wrote a book on medieval c-sections, finds that church advice in this period did not recommend elevating the fetus over the mother in decision-making during birth. Sapochnik and Martin certainly think that this world is taking cues from the medieval period, and often use that idea to justify their choices when it comes to things like women getting cut open against their will, so I think it’s possibly fair-and definitely interesting-to ask how true to that history this scene would be.Ĭould some men, as Sapochnik describes it, have chosen the fetus over the mother and ordered a c-section done anyway? McDougall points out that men were usually not at all involved with birth, which was the province of female relatives, neighbors, and midwives. House of the Dragon takes place earlier than Game of Thrones-172 years before the birth of would-be queen Daenerys Targaryen-and so maybe you could squint and call this the Middle Ages.
As Benjamin Breen argued convincingly back in 2014, many aspects of Martin’s epic fantasy world-including, Breen pointed out, some of the most interesting things about Westeros, like its cities, its diversity of overlapping and conflicting cultures, and the incipient decay of its monarchy-are far more early modern or Renaissance than medieval. First, it’s made up, and like any historical fiction, it takes liberties second, it’s pulling from a pastiche of historical influence that makes a classic “ fact vs. Analyzing Game of Thrones as history is a fool’s errand.
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