I keep a record – more of a running total really, just the headlines and maybe a brief note appended here and there – of birth stories that make the news. Or “failures in maternity care” as they can also, almost without exception, be called.
Well, you’ve got to have a hobby, haven’t you? It’s been a bumper few months recently, let me tell you! Really, ever since Lady Amos, the chair of the review of maternity care set up by the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, commented, as the reports began to come in that there were “much worse” than she had anticipated.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty terrible out there.
I don’t know what prompted my little hobby. The labour and delivery of my own son 14 years ago was a walk in the park. Apart from:
1. The failed epidural. As someone who essentially wanted her pregnancy sponsored by ICI (“All the drugs!” I cried as soon as the test resolved into two blue lines. “Give me all the drugs! Old, new, untested but promising! My veins are yours to do with as you wish!”) this was disappointing.
2. Not as disappointing, however, as the anaesthesiologist who performed it returning to say it hadn’t failed, and that I was just making a fuss. “It’s only supposed to take away 80-90 per cent of the pain,” she said, looking down at me as I continued convulse at 100 per cent. “I would love that,” I gasped. She tried twice more then gave up and left. From the hips down I was numb. The crucial part – call it the sort of “womb area” – was unaffected. Thus was I left for another 10 hours or so.
3. The insistence then that I would be given a Ventouse (suction cap/cup on the baby’s head, drag it out by force) delivery, in the face of my fervent pleas for a Caesarean section. I had by this time been asking for this futilely for nine months and 30 hours.
I am a tiny woman (5ft 2ins, who takes a child’s size-one shoe and has a proportionately unhelpful pelvis) who had bred with a normal-sized man and possessed a basic understanding of physics. “Did your mother have any problem?” roared one GP. “No, but she’s an Amazon,” I said. “I take after my dad’s side. All midgets.” The GP said: “If she had no problems, you’ll have no problems.” And that was – as I was coming to understand lots of things were – that.
4. The refusal of the anaesthetist (different one) and porter, both 30-year-old fit young men, to transfer me from trolley to delivery bed. Until I proved I couldn’t drag my half-paralysed body across, and they rolled their eyes in disgust at my laziness as they reluctantly engaged in the two seconds’ effort to do it for me.
5. The delivery itself. “Medieval” is the best word, I think. A broken coccyx, terrible tearing (I was back for repair work six months later, which was worse), and two litres of blood loss (a fatal amount, if you are not literally in hospital when it happens). I remember looking at the baby as he was placed in my husband’s arms as I slipped towards unconsciousness, and seeing my husband’s instant devotion fighting with his fear for me and thinking: “At least he will have someone to love him when I’m gone.”
These are just the lowlights. There’s much more – not least, the refusal to admit how much blood I’d lost (it was finally amended on my charts on the fifth day of my hospital stay, after a second transfusion). Also, the inability or unwillingness to diagnose my broken coccyx and therefore explain to me why I was still in such screaming agony and could not, despite medical impatience with my bed-hogging, leave it.
The strange thing is, you remember the disrespect with which you are treated far more than you remember the pain. You remember the dehumanisation and dismissal – as if you are little more than beast labouring in a field – far longer than the danger. And the rage at this incontestable evidence of the entrenched misogyny that is at the heart of it never leaves you.
Lady Amos’s interim report is out now and describes a litany of practical and attitudinal failings. You can see them all as the manifestation of the kind of marrow-deep prejudice you only get when for generations a historically male establishment – in this case the medical profession – has been in charge of women. Of deciding what they need, what is necessary, what is important, what is a priority and what is not. Legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder, not the beast in the field. It doesn’t matter than some of the people I was not helped by were women. The rot goes deep and shapes a service in ways beyond the remit of any individual.
And it has been left – like so many post-partum patients amongst Lady Amos’s interviewees – untended partly because mothers are too emotionally and physically shattered afterwards and for so long to advocate for ourselves as strongly as we need to. We also, you know, have these newborns to take care of. They really cut into your leisure time.
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We need (among other things, like a rebalancing of NHS funding, which of course gets siphoned off women’s services first), men to come on board for this one. Hey, perhaps the men – who have watched us labour, suffer and in some cases almost die to provide them with children – could form the vanguard? That they have not so far tells its own story too.
I can see that it’s a leap too far to expect men as a class to understand how the abstract concept of “feminism” is one that could help them too. But they should be able to grasp the idea of demanding concrete changes in treatment and research into conditions which can save the individual women they supposedly love and cherish, the actual and potential mothers of their children, from a very non-negligible chance of danger and death.
Use the horrors of the interim report as a rallying point. Because there are more to come. I refuse to believe that this is too much to ask.
Hence then, the article about my maternity nightmare left with me a broken coccyx and fourth degree tearing was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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