Dear Press & Media,

Can you start to report on birth truthfully? (And yes, I’m looking at you, The Times.)

May I remind any press that may stray across this post that the cost of litigation on maternity services in the UK since 2019 has surged to £27.4 billion, whereas the maternity budget remains at a paltry £18 billion. We are now paying out more in damages than we are paying in for service.

May I also remind the press that ALL humans are born and yet it still seems that maternity services are a niche ‘women’s’ issue.

May I remind anyone wishing to write a report about the awfulness of the ‘cult of normal birth’ that we do not complain about an understanding or ‘cult of normal heart rate’ or ‘cult of normal red and white blood cells’ or ‘cult of normal & healthy prostates’. That, perhaps if we truly understood and learned about normal birth then we could easily spot and help when things are no longer looking normal or healthy. 

If any of you are interested (& I appreciate to date that you have not been) most women are being offered medical inductions of their labours for no evidence based medical reason, from 39 weeks of pregnancy. They are ‘offered’ this again and again and rarely ever told of the risks. 

Also, that caesarean birth is now outstripping physiological birth. Clearly, if these stats were physiologically necessary we wouldn’t actually have survived as the human race.

Women who are not GBS positive but might have had a positive at the beginning of their pregnancy are being told that the protocol is to have antibiotics anyway. Even though they are now negative.

Women are still being told that they are at ‘risk’ because they are too fat, too old or too IVF even when these things alone are not actually illnesses necessitating medical induction of labour and it is not evidence based. 

You are failing to report on our lack of midwives, you are failing to report on midwives working insanely long hours with no breaks and you are failing to report on the damage being caused by care providers not listening to women.

Instead? Again and again women have to read the same old tripe about how old and how fat and how complicated we have all become. Did you even research that the average age of mothers at childbirth in 1938 was 29 and this has now risen to the much higher age of …31. 

Women are 51% of the population. 100% of the population will go through maternity services.

Do better.