Pregnant in the 23rd Century

The new Star Trek film begins with the USS Kelvin losing a showdown with a massive Romulan ship from the future, and George Kirk, Sr. having to go down with the ship while his pregnant wife escapes in Shuttle 37. I think Bill has gotten most of the nits (see his May 15 post) and this is the only one I could find which he didn't already catch:

Why does Winona Kirk give birth sitting up on a bed? One would think that by the 23rd Century doctors and women would have realized that the 20th Century hospital childbirth method is woefully inadequate in many ways. I realize that they were under rather exigent circumstances, what with the ship about to blow up and the shuttle being at risk for the same fate, but one would think the medical staff would try to assist in the childbirth in a way that is closer to ideal circumstances. When you want something to come out of your body, which way do you point the aperture? Down.

And if the medical staff has to tell Winona to push, doesn't that mean that the baby can wait at least a few minutes, say, until the shuttle is at a safe distance from the warring ships? There doesn't seem to be a good medical reason to hurry the baby out. In fact, it may very well be just a script contrivance to get the baby boy out in time for George to hear him in the last few minutes of his life. And why did they wait until the kid was born to discuss what to name him? So that the screenwriters could put on screen the "official Star Trek moment" of how James Tiberius Kirk got his name, and fit it into the frenetic pace of the movie. (And did Winona keep her maiden name at all? Or does tradition win out over feminism in the future?)

Their discussion makes it sound as if they had never discussed it before. In the 17th Century it may have made sense not to name children until they were actually born, because of the high rate of stillbirths. In the 20th Century, at least in the developed world, babies stood a much better chance of being born, in spite of all the unnatural interventions of doctors (painkillers for the woman, slapping the newborn, and so on). By the 23rd Century I would hope that good prenatal care and diagnosis would be available to all women, whether she's some unknown woman or the wife of a starship captain (or a starship captain herself).