The fate of the entire Star Wars galaxy could have been drastically different if its incompetent doctors had bothered to know more about female anatomy.
Sarah Jeong, a contributing editor for Motherboard, wrote an article called “Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic?” on January 3, prompting questions about OB/GYNs in space and the medical prowess of those lame maternity droids. Jeong’s article points out how painfully unrealistic women’s health care is in Star Wars.
A huge part of the plot in Revenge of the Sith revolves around Anakin freaking the fuck out because he keeps having fever dreams about Padme dying in childbirth. It’s, technically, the reason he turns to the Dark Side of the Force and becomes the Darth Vader the world knows and loves.
Sure, dreaming of your wife’s death is terrifying. But here’s the thing, Anakin: your very pregnant, very secret wife is a senator who lives in a penthouse on Coruscant. If anyone is going to be able to check into a fancy hospital and get top-notch medical care for herself and your guys’s unborn twins, it’s her.
“But no, in Revenge of the Sith, everything related to birth is just a big question mark hanging over the characters,” Jeong writes. “Who even knoooooows how uteruses work? Sometimes they just kill people, randomly, because you get sad.”
It seems that OB/GYNs and general knowledge about the miracle of childbirth are in short supply in the Star Wars universe. (This, obviously, could have nothing to do with the entire Star Wars series being written by men.)
As Jeong writes, Padme never goes to an OB/GYN on or off screen (proven by everyone’s shock over Padme giving birth to twins rather than just one baby, as that’s something a doctor would have told her), and no one suggests that as a way to calm everyone’s worries. Mainly, Anakin’s worries. He falls to the Dark Side because he’s looking for a way to “save” Padme.
“Maybe Anakin is just extremely stupid (an explanation we can’t ignore), but given that we’ve established that Padme never got an ultrasound, it seems more likely that there were no medical options that they could turn to before his thought processes went straight to ‘Betray The Jedi Order And Everything I Believe In,’” Jeong writes. “In a galaxy of bacta tanks that can heal grievous wounds, and highly advanced cybernetic prosthetics to replace limbs, reproductive health is stuck in the middle ages.”
Basically, Anakin could have fulfilled his Chosen One prophecy a lot sooner if the galaxy spent a little money on women’s healthcare.
