Now, I preface this with the fact I love the NHS. I really, really do. It’s a hundred times better than any privatised, corporate system could ever be and it has some of the most dedicated people working for it I’ve ever come across.
So why am I so angry with it?
Because it’s failing women.
Just some examples, from one single class yesterday.
One woman told me her midwife had told her she wasn’t allowed to write her birth plan until she’d been to her NHS antenatal class.
Not ‘you’ll know more after you’ve been to class’. Not ‘the appointment is scheduled for X weeks and you’ll have been to your class then so we’ll discuss it together after’. Not ‘get started now and we’ll go through it together after class in case there’s anything else you want to add to it’.
Not. Allowed.
Not allowed to have an opinion about HER birth at the time of HER choosing. Not allowed to exercise her absolute right to think, plan, decision-make over one of the biggest events of her life. Not allowed to create a tool that connects her to her baby, to her birth.
Language. Fucking. Matters.
And then, a conversation about augmentation of labour. A second-time mom asked why the NHS hadn’t given her this information, the information she needed to make her decisions. This is a mother who HAD BEEN THROUGH THIS PROCESS. She’d HAD the drip and ARM. And she hadn’t known why or what might happen. She asked me why she hadn’t been told this.
She actually wanted an answer.
What could I say?
I spend 9 hours officially (12 hours realistically) talking about it and many many many hours guiding them on top of that, and I barely scratch the surface. The new NHS parentcraft programme has a 2 hour session on labour. Two hours to learn how your body works, what medical assistance there is, to learn what might help you birth your baby.
‘Why don’t they tell us that accepting things has consequences?’
I don’t know. I know they SHOULD. I know I WANT them to. I know I’m glad for each and every woman who comes to me because they get those 12 (18…20…22….24…) hours of me repeating it’s your choice, you have the control, what are the benefits, what are the risks, what might it lead to, what if you say no, it’s your choice, IT’S YOUR CHOICE over and over and over and over and sometimes some of them believe it.
Our bodies are designed to do this but we’ve created these wonderful intervention techniques that help when our bodies don’t work perfectly or our babies need help and then we hold it secret so nobody knows what it’s really about. But then nobody trusts their bodies either because if they worked we wouldn’t have all these interventions would we and so these women, these poor, poor women are left with TWO HOURS of information and then they come out the other end lost and broken and feeling like they’ve failed because how could they possibly win if they’re not even in the same race?
I’m sure the new NHS programme has merit. It sounds like it’s a huge step forward, weaving in attachment and mental health and other vitally important things. But it’s not enough. And that needs to be recognised and if there’s no money to invest in preparing women for something that can impact the rest of their lives, their attachment with their baby, their relationships with their partners, family and friends, their own wellbeing (don’t forget that maternal suicide is THE most common cause of death after childbirth), their future family plans…if there’s no money to protect all of that then why the hell are we not making it commonplace for women to get this information from alternative sources? Why are we giving out fucking Bounty bags instead of educational resources? Why are we allowing Emma’s Diary to fill the screens of antenatal clinics instead of using them to signpost women to information that could save their mental and physical health? Why are we letting down some of the most vulnerable people we have in society?
I’m so angry about it. And so sad for them. It’s a horrendous, stupid broken mess of a system and it doesn’t get any better.
I’m an antenatal teacher because of this shit. Because I desperately don’t want people to go through what I went through. Because I want to stop women being too scared to have more babies, too scared to go back into the hospital that traumatised them, too scared to even THINK about their pregnancy because after pregnancy comes birth and I’ve done my very best to block out any thought about that because of the panic attacks it makes me have. I volunteer with the NHS in two different capacities to try and work within the system, to make it better, to stop breaking women, to stop failing them. I’m not a big corporation. I’m not a profit-making business or well-known monopolising charity. God (well, HMRC) knows I don’t do this for the money, I give away too many free places to women for that! I do it because you deserve better.
Stockport Birth Services 