Tonight:
5°c
Giving birth is not exactly a fun experience in the best of circumstances. But it doesn't have to be a form of medieval torture either.
The maternity unit complaints logged on Patient Opinion, a website launched this week, are shocking. Women said they felt demeaned and humiliated. Others claimed they had been forced to wait hours for beds. One woman found cockroaches in an eating area.
As a diehard sceptic and martyr (two babies born with no pain relief), I am usually wary of gory birth stories. They can sound moany, overblown and hysterical. It's too easy to portray the reality of birth as something horrifying. We all know a woman who has relished relaying every exaggerated detail, especially to terrified friends who have yet to give birth.
But these latest stories have a ring of truth to them. Why are we still hearing them? Maternity services have been in a mess for years and the Government has repeatedly made pledges about improvement. If anything is changing, it's too slow.
Anyone who has had a hospital birth knows what it's like, especially in London where midwife shortages are at their most acute. You're not spared the sight of other people's blood in the bathrooms. You don't get the one-to-one care you were promised throughout your pregnancy. You could well end up “sharing” your midwife with two or three other women. It's a fight to dilate fast enough to keep anyone's attention.
The hardest thing to cope with, though, is the lack of hygiene, as highlighted in these internet complaints. When I was pregnant with my first child, the alarm bells sounded when we were advised in ante-natal classes to stock up on antiseptic wipes — so that we could clean the place ourselves. Mine came in handy, although I scrubbed so enthusiastically post-birth that when I emerged from the bathroom I almost fainted and they had to send someone to push me back to my bed in a wheelchair.
I had my second child at home in the kitchen (with an NHS midwife). At least there I know who's responsible for the surfaces. Waiting for a bed is annoying but bearable. Most of us can sympathise with busy, stressed midwives, but having to clean a public toilet while having contractions or quietly haemorrhaging is an insult.
Ultimately, this sorry situation is the hallmark of a society that disrespects women. It is clear that none of this is the fault of the midwives. The Royal College of Midwives has been saying for months that we need to fund another 5,000 midwives to get up to decent staffing levels, which are not keeping pace with the rising birth rate. Dirty conditions and staff numbers are administrative and financial concerns.
The Government has now got four months to sort them out until their self-appointed 2009 deadline, the year when “every woman will have the birth of her choice”. Like any labouring woman at five centimetres, they'd better get on with it.
