How Britain became a dangerous place to have a baby
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What are the roots of today’s maternity crisis? Recent research by the Care Quality Commission has found a “concerning decline” in England, with over half of maternity wards rated substandard. Donna Ockenden’s review of Shrewsbury and Telford maternity trust found that, between 2001 and 2019, 201 babies and nine mothers had died avoidable deaths.
In this week’s audio long read, the editor of the New Statesman’s Spotlight magazine Alona Ferber traces the origins of this decline – from the advent of woman-centred care in the 1980s to today’s more frayed and divided landscape. Are austerity and political indifference the key factors, and does an ideological split over ‘natural’ and ‘medical’ birth play a part? “Thirty years ago,” Ferber writes, “when power moved from the institution to the individual, that shift was radical, progressive and revolutionary. It was about women’s rights and politics, as much as it was about health. But today the system is so stretched that the nexus of power is nowhere. It is not with clinical staff, nor with families. Instead, we muddle through.” Drawing on interviews with practitioners and her own birth experiences, she pieces together the elements of an ongoing crisis.
Written and read by Alona Ferber.
This article was originally published on 30 September 2023 and you can read the text version here.
If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like Sophie McBain on The ADHD decade: what’s behind the boom in adult diagnoses
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statement podcast is sponsored by EDF, Britain's biggest generator of zero carbon electricity. |
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| 0:30.8 | The New Statement |
| 0:38.3 | You're listening to audio-long reads from The New Statement, the best of our reported features |
| 0:42.7 | and essays read aloud. In this episode, how Britain became a dangerous place to have a baby, |
| 0:48.8 | written and read by me alone afurba. The link to read the article online is in the show notes. |
| 0:57.3 | The midwife had warned me, second babies are born fast. You will need to get to hospital |
| 1:03.6 | sooner than you think, she said, her kind brown eyes looking at me above a surgical mask. |
| 1:09.1 | And when you get there, tell them your first baby came fast too. She said it so many times I |
| 1:15.2 | half expected my second child to explode out of me. When the day came, I headed to my local |
| 1:21.5 | London hospital within three hours of the first contraction. Stumbling into maternity triage, |
| 1:26.7 | I repeated the mantra, it's my second baby, the first came fast. I wanted to go into a birthing |
| 1:33.5 | pool I said, but the woman on the other side of the glass muttered that this would not be possible. |
| 1:38.8 | Barely looking up from her paperwork, she passed me a plastic vial and asked for a urine sample. |
| 1:43.4 | Time contorts during labour. My daughter was born only 45 minutes later, but before she emerged |
| 1:51.0 | slick and silent into the water, there was an endless stretch of minutes. During that time, |
| 1:56.9 | the following happened. Me managing to explain a urine sample was superfluous. |
| 2:02.9 | My partner and I waiting in an empty room while two staff members were they midwives, |
| 2:08.0 | were they nurses, discussed what to do with me. Me being taken to a room with a pool, |
... |
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