KATE BUSH - THIS WOMAN’S WORK

Released: November 20, 1989

Charts:  UK: #25 

“This Woman’s Work” it’s a Kate Bush’s song originally written for the climax of John Hughes’s 1988 film “She’s Having a Baby”. Although the track later appeared on Bush’s 1989 album “The Sensual World”, its origins lie firmly within the cinematic moment it was created to underscore. Released as the album’s second single, it reached No. 25 on the UK Singles Chart.

Bush wrote it specifically for a pivotal sequence in the film in which Jake (Kevin Bacon) waits helplessly in a hospital as complications threaten the lives of his wife Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern) and their unborn child. As he sits in anguish, the film cuts between the sterile waiting room and flashbacks of the couple’s happier days—moments of love, intimacy, and everyday life now cast in a painful new light. Bush composed the song directly to the visuals, writing from the man’s perspective as he confronts guilt, fear, responsibility, and the possibility of devastating loss.

Tarquin Gotch, the film’s music supervisor, later revealed that the temporary soundtrack for the scene was This Mortal Coil’s cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” but when rights couldn’t be secured, John Hughes approached Bush—who created an entirely new piece that ultimately became inseparable from the film’s emotional core.

While written from a male perspective, “This Woman’s Work” is fundamentally about the terror and vulnerability of moments when life hangs in the balance. It captures the helplessness of watching someone you love suffer while being unable to intervene. Its quiet, aching vocal delivery and minimal arrangement heighten the emotional intensity, turning a specific film moment into a universal meditation on fear, regret, and devotion.

The music video, directed by Bush herself, expands the narrative in a parallel story. It opens with Bush alone in a blackened room, illuminated by a single spotlight as she plays the song’s opening notes on a piano. The scene then shifts to a man (Tim McInnerny) pacing anxiously in a hospital waiting room. Through fragmented flashbacks and blurred memories, the viewer sees his wife (played by Bush) collapse during dinner, the frantic drive to the hospital, and his frantic pursuit through the corridors as she is taken away on a stretcher. While he waits for news, dread overwhelms him, and he imagines worst-case scenarios—including a silent vision of the nurse telling him she has died. The final moment brings him back to reality as the nurse gently reassures him offscreen before the video closes with Bush quietly covering the piano keyboard.