If we ask what would we need to attend a sudden delivery, even the most neophyte in this of births and babies will answer without hesitation that hot towels. The cinema is largely to blame.
This scene will sound very cinematic to you: the pregnant woman unexpectedly feels contractions and that the baby is being born (why will it never be so fast really?). The baby is here! Nerves, races from here to there, scream if there is a doctor in the room ... there is no time to go to the hospital.
A call to Emergencies then advises to prepare hot water and clean towels or sheets. When not, it is the popular wisdom of those present on the scene, who shout "We need hot towels!", scissors (buuffff ...!), a cordonera ...
But among all the improvised elements in the face of this sudden delivery, the hot towels had always caught my attention. Evidently, they were not to do a skin cleansing to the mother or the baby, but exactly, Where does the impulse to ask for hot towels to attend a delivery come from?
Is it a useless resource invented to give emotion to the scene? Because afterwards they rarely show us on the screen, so we don't know very well what all the collected objects are used for improvised care.
The World Health Organization advises that warm clothes and towels are needed to attend a home delivery to wrap the newborn and keep it warm.
The truth is that reviewing photos of births, although I do not remember that there was a towel that wrapped them, in many the baby is received with a towel, I think that apart from what was said, so that it does not slip and clean it a bit.
In any case, the baby when passing from the uterine environment to the outside undergoes transcendental changes and those warm clothes and towels help him to make the transit less abrupt and to control his body temperature. Of course, that being skin to skin with mom will be the best…
So that the request for hot towels for childbirth "film" that we have seen so many times is not an invented cinematographic topic but, indeed, it has a base, and it will help that the photogenic film babies are also warm.
