When I gave birth in the 00s, things were not perfect by any stretch, but unlike now, they were not broken absolutely everywhere, writes Zoe Williams
The birth trauma scandal is not about one bad apple, one bad culture or one bad area – it’s about the mess of austerityWhen I gave birth in the 00s, things were not perfect by any stretch, but unlike now, they were not broken absolutely everywheret’s a convention as old as our species that if you have a hideous experience giving birth, you don’t tell younger women about it in case it puts them off.
It seems important to draw some lines, here, between “normal for childbirth”, “normal for the 21st century” and “normal for life under a Tory government”. The debate has already started to veer off to its happy place, where an interviewer will compare and contrast the modern experience with a woman who gave birth in the 70s and spent a week recovering on a well-staffed maternity ward, where midwives with all the time in the world would bring you toast and teach you how to swaddle.
Sure, that’s not data, that’s just vibes. And there was already evidence of racism in the system, pre-2010: women from black and minority ethnic backgrounds However, we have plenty of data about money and staffing: two years into the coalition government, half of all NHS health regions were cutting their maternity budgets, even as birth rates were at their. In 2015, nearly 100,000 more babies were born than in 2001.
The authors of the birth trauma report call for a system “where poor care is the exception rather than the rule”, which is a strange way to put it: if you’re putting together a wish list, surely you’d hope to eradicate poor care? But that’s evidently just the most polite way they could find to say: this system is broken everywhere. It’s not a story of one bad apple, or one bad chief executive, or one bad institutional culture, or one underprivileged area.
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