The recent Ockenden report was shocking and alarming and the findings misrepresented by some columnists which prompted me to write to several newspapers and woman’s hour. Below is what the Daily Mail recently published.
“WHILE the Ockenden report into the failings of the Strewbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust was shameful, shocking and daming of the maternity service, it is doing pregnant women a hugh disservice to assert that natural birth is wrong. As a veteran childbirth education and Early National Childbirth Teacher, I beleive what is wrong is the under-funding of maternity services, leaving women without monitoring, expertise, care and respect.
Pregnancy, labour and birth are natureal physiological functions. Most babies are born without the questionable benefits of modern obstetric practices.
It is the task for care-givers to distinguish between those who want and need medical assistance to achieve a safe birth and the majority of women who don’t.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, hospital maternity practices were dehumanising. On entering hospital in labour, a woman was given a strong enema, an injection of pethidine, told to lie down and then was then left alone.
She was routinely cut before her baby was born. The newborn was quickly removed to a nursery and the mother could only feed and cuddle her child only every 4 hours.
Many women began to question these draconian routines and reclaim birth as something they did, rather than something done to them.
Good maternity practices involve listening to a woman in labour and supporting her choices.
Roll on 50 years and hospital births are again associated with trauma due to the lack of staff and not listening to women. Induction rates are high which can leave to foetal distress and emergency Caesareans.
It is not natural birth that is the problem, it is over-medicalisation without due care coupled with a bureaucratic culture that says it is the institution, not the mother, who knows best.,
JACKIE WHITFORD, Brighton”