Emmerdale’s Charity faces death in birth emergency as she bleeds out
Charity Dingle (Emma Atkins) giving birth was always going to be quite the spectacle in Emmerdale, but it goes in a way no one could have anticipated.
Charity has been hiding a whopper of a secret that granddaughter Sarah Sugden (Katie Hill) and Jacob Gallagher (Joe-Warren Plant) are not the parents of the surrogate baby she’s carrying, as everyone believes.
The baby is in fact the result of a mad night with her ex Ross Barton (Michael Parr).
Big old whoopsie there, but while the baby has been inside, Charity’s secret has been somewhat safe, bar from having to convince Ross to keep schtum.
But the day of reckoning was always going to come, and here it is in all it’s dramatic glory. It’s the day of the baby shower and Charity is struck with several doses of bad luck that shape up to a life-threatening situation.
The first is that the cake she’s ordered can’t be delivered. She and Mack Boyd (Lawrence Robb) resolve to go and pick it up, but both manage to leave their phones behind.
Actress Emma Atkins gives Metro a lovely little sneak peek into this seemingly innocuous moment.
‘Mack won’t let her drive because she’s so heavily pregnant and says, “I’ll drive.” So, they go in pursuit of the cake and at the very last minute, when she’s on the phone to the cake lady, her phone dies, and without thinking, she gives it to Chas,’ Emma explained. Mack then absentmindedly gives up his phone too.
‘Mack is wearing a huge baby suit, and he puts his phone in the baby suit and then takes it off to drive, so neither of them have any facility to call the outside world and say, “Charity’s gone into labour!”’
This tiny error will have huge consequences.
They pause for a toilet stop en route but their car breaks down. The perfect time for Mother Nature to decide Charity’s waters should break.
As labour progresses for Charity, a car approaches and they flag it down – it’s none other than the real baby daddy Ross. He agrees to give them a lift to the hospital, but it’s awkward all round.
At the hospital, Charity, Mack, and Ross bundle into a lift when bad luck dose number two hits – the lift breaks down.
So now Charity is fast heading towards active labour, Sarah has only just noticed all of the missed calls, and the confined lift space triggers Mack’s PTSD from being trapped in John’s bunker. That leaves Ross with his faculties to try and save this situation.
Sarah arrives at the hospital but is totally thrown when they have no record of her gran arriving. That’s because she’s not made it past the lift shaft yet.
Ross tries to call for help over the intercom, and when a midwife finally comes on the comms, they say Mack and Ross will need to deliver the baby. But Mack is in a bad way and Charity is forced to snap him out of it.
Emma reveals: ‘He just recoils into the corner and is like this frightened animal. She’s like, “Don’t you dare! Come on, get yourself together.” It’s just chaotic!’
Sarah is left fearing the worst as Mack and Ross roll up their sleeves. With Mack semi-incapacitated, Ross steps up to deliver what is truthfully his own baby. He does a good job, but then notices that Charity is sitting in an ever-increasing pool of blood.
‘There’s every possibility that it’s just not looking good,’ Emma teases. ‘The odds are stacked against her in terms of giving birth in that situation. All sorts of complications have come into it, so it’s touch and go, and everyone’s fraught with emotion. It was like being in an episode of Casualty, with doctors running around and lots of medical vocab.’
Will they get her out of the lift in time?
Emma hints at what’s next for Charity, and though it looks like in one way or another she might survive the gruesome lift scene, there may be some things ahead that make the dramatic lift birth seem like a day at the funfair.