It was telling how many grandmothers wrote to me, contrasting their own labours more than 30 years ago on efficient, consultant-led wards, with the distress, danger and lack of continuity experienced by their daughters under midwife care. At the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Sheila’s grandson was unable to come out because he had the cord around his neck and it was too short to allow him to be born. “The midwife told us that it was going according to plan,” Sheila recalls.
“My grandson’s life was saved because a senior nurse put her head around the door to say she had just come on duty. To her inquiry, ‘How is it going?’, my farmer son-in-law replied: ‘If this was a lambing, I would say it is going very badly indeed.’
“His comment caused the staff nurse to call a doctor and my grandson was cut out, it being too late for a C-section. Blessedly, he suffered no harm, unlike another baby who was born in the same unit two weeks later and was severely brain damaged. I have often wondered if that poor woman had the same midwife as my daughter or just one with the same ideology. I will always be grateful that one staff nurse did not bow to the superior purpose of the midwife.”
What purpose could possibly be superior to getting a baby out alive? You’d be surprised. The word “ideology” cropped up again and again in your descriptions of midwives. So did “chippy”, “defensive”, “cruel”, “famously aggressive”, “territorial” and “thick”. Yes, some midwives are wonderful, but as an ex-midwife who left because of bullying by senior colleagues told me: “The kind ones who really care always leave.”
Just how qualified are the ones who stay? Midwives used to do a full nursing training before specialising in midwifery. No longer. “I’m sorry, but they simply don’t have the knowledge or the experience of critical care they once had,” complained one consultant, “and very often, they are too slow or too stubborn to admit that a labour isn’t progressing as it should and the foetus is distressed.”
It’s not only baby that’s distressed. “Allison, do you remember that episode of All Creatures Great and Small when James Herriot helps a calf into the world by sticking an arm up inside a cow and pulling?” asked Lindy. That visceral, bloody scene, Lindy told me, was re-enacted when her grandson came belatedly into the world at the Princess Royal University Hospital in Orpington. After a labour of 37 hours (and overdue at 42 weeks’ pregnant), Lindy’s daughter Tanya had repeatedly asked midwives if she could have a Caesarean, and was told that she couldn’t, “and that she was talking too much”.
“Even when it was clear that the baby was in distress, no plan was made for a C-section. The doctor was only called when the midwife Tanya had first seen on the Friday evening came back for the Saturday evening shift and was surprised to find her still there,” says Lindy. “Early on Sunday, Tanya was finally taken into surgery and a ventouse was used unsuccessfully. Eventually, the doctor pushed both arms up to the elbow inside Tanya and dragged Harry out. In the process, the baby was without oxygen to the brain for some period and did not breathe for five long minutes after he was born.”
A lovely boy, clearly adored by his granny, Harry suffers from ADHD and autism and is obsessed with death. Tanya was left incontinent. Her mother says she was far too traumatised to make a complaint.
There are many more stories like those. Too many. I am returning to this subject today because your emails have convinced me that pregnant women in the UK are at an unacceptably high risk. According to the latest figures, of the 193 NHS maternity services in England, 80 are rated as “inadequate” or “requires improvement”. That means 40 per cent do not meet basic safety standards. How is this allowed to happen in a first world country?
