It was hard to read. The Ockenden report into the deadly failures of maternity care at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is a compendium of incompetence, tragedy, callous resistance to change and downright abusive treatment of labouring and grieving mothers. The review, chaired by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, covered a 19-year period from 2000 onwards, during which it found that at least 200 babies and nine mothers died due to poor care. More than 100 more were left with brain injuries and lifelong disabilities.

Despite repeated investigations and reviews, nothing was done. When families complained, they were either blamed for the deaths of their own babies or fobbed off. If this had happened in Soviet Russia, we’d all be saying it was a sign of the system’s utter moral bankruptcy.

The report named a number of problems, among them staffing pressures and a bullying, uncooperative culture. But there was another, insidious cause, too: an ideology of favouring vaginal births over caesareans, enshrined in targets, that caused staff to refuse or delay operations until it was too late.

For those wondering how such a fixation could possibly take hold to such a degree, the answer is that this is just part of a broader progressive ideology rife in maternity services across the NHS. All too often, the mother’s well-being is put last behind a deranged, Gaia-inspired notion of what birth and motherhood should be.

It began in the 1970s with a movement to reduce unnecessary medicalisation of birth and the dehumanising treatment of mothers in labour. But it has morphed from something that was about protecting mothers into a normative ideology that blindly promotes particular approaches on the basis of poorly substantiated theories like “attachment parenting” or “positive birth”.

Of course, if a mother wants to embrace these approaches for herself, there is no problem or reason why not. But the NHS, and popular antenatal classes like those held by the NCT charity, are actively advancing these ideas as the only “right” or “healthy” way to bear and care for a baby.

It begins with birth. The NHS is still promoting vaginal birth as by far the best choice even to post-caesarean women who run a 1-in-200 risk of their womb tearing. When pregnant for the second time last year, I remember being asked to attend an NHS “seminar” (over the phone, due to Covid) on post-caesarean birth. The message was clear: everyone should be planning on vaginal delivery. The subtler signal seemed to be that any woman who didn’t manage this had failed.

Attending an appointment, I received a nod of approval when I stated that I would try it. I had read about the risks myself, but I certainly did not trust the hospital to be honest and impartial in offering advice about them. There was a clear whiff of ideology in the air. In the end, put off by everything about the NHS, I went private. Most women don’t have that option.

This same mode of thinking feeds through into all sorts of maternity services. Take breastfeeding. The entire NHS machine is set up to force-feed propaganda about the poorly evidenced benefits of breastfeeding to new mothers, without a single thought for the effect on their mental health. Mothers are effectively told that if they don’t breastfeed, their babies will be obese, stupid and unhealthy, when the studies these claims derive from actually show a negligible benefit when maternal socio-economic status and IQ are removed from the equation.

Either way, the truth is that most women want to breastfeed and do not need persuading that they should try it. They need help dealing with the unbelievable physical toll, pain and gruelling marathon it entails. Instead, in thrall to extreme progressive campaign groups like La Leche League, the NHS delivers an onslaught of guilt-tripping, promoting wholly unverified ideas like the notion that a few bottles of formula might “confuse” a baby so that it won’t be able to feed naturally any more. Nor is it deemed acceptable to admit that exclusively breastfeeding a baby places almost the entire burden of childcare on the mother.

The propaganda is unrelenting – unless a kindly health visitor takes pity and whispers the truth quietly, where her bosses can’t hear: “You don’t actually have to breastfeed – I didn’t.”

It gets worse when it comes to sleep. There is almost no routine or sound advice given on the subject. Despite the endless chatter about mental health, for which sleep is essential, it is apparently seen as an optional extra for new mothers.

Obviously, a new baby is an inherently exhausting thing, especially at first. But we have reached the point where the NHS is offering demonstrably incorrect advice to mothers that leads many women to endure levels of sleep deprivation that are illegal under the Geneva Convention for months or even years on end.

Take this example, from an NHS poster that I saw displayed in a GP practice: “Myth: you should leave babies to settle alone so that they learn to be independent. Reality: When babies are left alone they think they have been abandoned.” This is an Orwellian level of misinformation. There is no good evidence for the theory that letting babies learn to sleep on their own, even if it means crying, damages them in any discernible way. There is evidence that excessive sleep deprivation damages both babies and mothers. Yet mothers who are at their wits’ end are being wrongly told that the only possible route out of their nightmare constitutes child abuse.

Is it any wonder we are suffering from plagues of child and mother mental health problems, emotional issues, obesity, family breakdown, “diagnoses” of new “conditions” or concentration problems when our national health system is promoting the idea that a mother simply has to accept tending to her child every time it cries, even if this means waking up four times a night for months or years?

There is a clear pattern here: the mother doesn’t matter. She’s just a vessel for birthing the sprog or meeting some target set on the basis of a damaging progressive fantasy about the “state of nature”. The truth, as women have known for most of human history, is that nature is brutal. It works by letting a certain number of women and babies die. That is why we have medicine.

Yet until the NHS is taken down from its pedestal and seen not as some benevolent giver of services to grateful supplicants but as a service run for the benefit of patients, it will remain free to mistreat people in the name of cruel ideologies with no consequences whatsoever. Save the NHS? God no. Save us from the NHS. Please.