SARAH VINE: At the heart of this maternity care tragedy is an extreme ideology
Can you imagine a forceps delivery so violent it shatters a baby’s skull? Or a woman in the agonies of labour being told she’s ‘pathetic’ and ‘lazy’?
The inquiry into the deaths of mothers and babies at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, published yesterday, has unearthed a catalogue of horrors almost too gruesome to contemplate Such a catastrophic failure, on such a scale, is hard to understand. It seems impossible that someone, somewhere, would not have noticed what was going on, that a situation so clearly appalling could have been allowed to persist for so long without some authority stepping in or asking questions.
I’m talking about the NHS’s obsession – central to this report on Shrewsbury and universally acknowledged as a major factor – with so-called ‘natural’ childbirth, almost at any cost. An aversion to the idea of medical intervention during labour and a particular horror of caesarean sections. A caesarean section generally costs considerably more than a ‘natural’ birth. Bodies such as the Royal College of Midwives and Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists made it clear that they were not in favour of medical intervention during childbirth. Mother Nature knows best was the mantra – even though, of course, maternal death rates before modern medicine would strongly suggest otherwise.
When I had my first child in 2003, I clearly remember such attitudes prevailing. At my NCT antenatal classes at the local hospital, instructed by midwives, the first thing we were told was that a vaginal birth – described as ‘normal’, the clear implication being that anything else was ‘abnormal’ – was the ‘desirable’ outcome.
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