Opposition to vaccination is based on the belief that vaccines represent the violation of the body’s natural healing properties. Antivaxxers hold that good nutrition and environmental surrounds (no dispute there) and exposure to infectious childhood diseases such as measles and chicken pox (at the famed “chickenpox parties) builds up natural immunity to these maladies. The exposure of the body to “foreign” elements such as spike protein is thus a deliberate assault and has been held by opponents of Covid-19 vaccines to have been a major factor in the deaths from myocardial conditions that they attribute to the jabs.
That a welter of medical trial and mortality data and peer reviewed studies has overwhelmingly confirmed the safety of vaccines does not and will likely never shift antivaxxer beliefs. Opponents of water fluoridation also see similarly malign threats to nature’s healing capacities by powerful forces like Big Pharma and an overweening state. Fundamentalist Catholic opposition to both artificial contraception and abortion is based on Natural law precepts and, like antivaxxers, deployed a corpus of pseudoscience such as supposed causal relationships between pregnancy terminations and breast cancer and infertility to bolster their arguments.
Recently, in another fraught area of women’s reproductive health, birth and the scandals around the state of maternity services detailed most forcefully in the Ockenden Report on Nottingham Maternity Services and the Amos review on national NHS maternity care, ideological fixations with the desirability of ‘natural birth’ have been identified as inimical to pregnant women’s health. This body of work has also uncovered deep institutional racism over the experience of BME women in maternity care. Essentially contested views on pregnancy and birth have created space for bad actors to operate in; bad actors such as the Free Birth Society who were the subject of a previous TPQ article of mine and who have again featured in more baby deaths around the world.
Natural Birth Ideology
Natural Birth Ideology is the belief that physiological, low intervention birth is the ideal birth method. It emphasises vaginal birth without medical intervention such as induction, epidural or surgical procedures, viewing childbirth as a natural process, best supported by midwifery and minimal interference. Advocates argue that it respects the body’s natural rhythm, reduces unnecessary interventions and promotes maternal autonomy. The spectrum of this ideology ranges from informal, low-intervention birth to the Free Birth Society doctrine that all births should be physiological regardless of risk. Historically some beliefs about natural birth were influenced by moral or religious ideas, such as the notion that childbirth pain was a divine punishment. Modern natural birth ideology is grounded in the philosophy of salutogenesis and advocacy for physiological birth rather than moral judgment. It often advocates with midwifery led care models and home birth advocacy.[1]
Rigid adherence to natural birth ideology can conflict with medical care and informed patient choice. A particular imperative for supporters is the reduction of the need for caesarean sections to the bare minimum The prioritisation of ‘normal birth at call cost’ has had deleterious effects of standards of maternal and neonatal care within the NHS and its promotion has been identified by many of its critics as a significant factor in the series of maternity hospital care scandals that has riven the NHS in the opening decades of the 21st century, the most damning of which was senior midwife Donna Ockenden’s recently published four year report into the “cruel” and substandard care in maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. The ideological divide in the NHS over natural or ‘normal’ birth theory and practice has been acute. Amongst the numerous malpractices identified by Donna Ockenden that the “quest for normal birth” contributed to the avoidable harm and deaths of more than 500 women and babies. However in her national review of maternity care, Baroness Amos and her team “did not find that ‘normal’ birth ideology’ was currently widespread’. This conclusion led to the resignation of Bill Kirkup, one of her twelve clinical advisors and of Britain’s leading maternity investigators, from his role on the inquiry.[2]
NHS Maternity Services and Natural Birth Ideology
As alluded to earlier, caesarean or C-sections are a particular flashpoint in the Natural Births debate. From 2007 to 2017, the Royal College of Midwives advised that women should try to have a vaginal birth without surgical intervention, and NHS England told hospitals to try to reduce caesarean sections to about 20% of births. This “normal birth at any cost” culture was central to the scandal uncovered by Bill Kirkup in Morecambe Bay in 2015 where it was found that clinicians had ignored or failed to respond quickly enough to problems during childbirth. James Titcombe, whose son Joshua died of sepsis in 2008 after failures in the Morecambe Bay maternity scandal, said he believed natural birth ideology remained a “significant and widespread patient safety issue”, and that Amos’s review appeared to have “taken a superficial approach”.[3]
The hegemony of natural birth ideology and its effects on maternity patient care is laid out by Clare Wilson. She asserts that the best-known advocates of natural birth may be the National Childbirth Trust (NCT); she reports that those who attended NCT antenatal classes were discouraged by their teachers from seeking medical assistance. Less well known is that from the 1990s onwards the “natural” birth agenda was gaining ground among university researchers and campaigners and over the next decade it became baked into policy documents for midwives and doctors. A key development was the publication in 2012 of NHS guidelines produced in partnership with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) and the NCT which encouraged to boost their rate of “normal” births[4].
Called Focus on normal birth and reducing Caesarean section rates, it highlighted the UK’s rising C-section rates – 24 per cent in 2006 – and offered hospitals a range of measures to try to reduce them to 20 per cent and ideally 15 per cent. It claimed – without good evidence – that this would reduce rates of death and harm from childbirth as well as bringing the NHS financial savings. While the supposed premise of these guidelines was that it was better for mothers and babies to deliver vaginally, it was in reality a cost-cutting exercise according to an anonymously quoted former obstetrician.[5]
Wilson then details how the successive incidences of NHS maternity scandals took place in hospitals which had striven hardest for low C-section rates. First up was at Furness General Hospital in Morecambe Bay where 11 babies and one mother were found to have died needlessly the inquiry reported in 2015. According to Dr Bill Kirkup, one of the country’s leading maternity investigators, who led the inquiry “There was a growing mood amongst midwives to promote natural childbirth”[6]
Next came two similar maternity safety scandals at two linked hospitals in East Kent and Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital which for years had publicised its low C-section rate of 14 per cent compared with the national average of 23 per cent at the time. One East Kent mother said “I felt that … I was made to have a natural birth when an emergency C – section was more appropriate, just so they didn’t dent their precious natural birth rate”. Emily Barley whose baby Beatrice died at Barnsley Hospital in 2022 reported that every concern she raised was met with the rejoinder “It’s just normal birth, everything is OK”.[7]
Further evidence that ideology rather than patient health drove decision making especially in hospitals with extremely low C-sections but with higher rates of still births and neonatal deaths is provided by Dr Nadeem Maghal’s analysis of the ills at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. This Trust had the lowest rates of C-sections in the country between 2012 and 2023 but over the same period, its rate of stillbirths and newborn baby deaths were the worst nationally. Its own 2015 maternity strategy expected all parts of the service to actively promote “normal” birth ‘The home births team’s language emphasised that “birth” is a natural and physiological process.’[8]
Despite the mounting evidence of the harm being caused by the prioritising of “normal birth” at all costs culture, the ! newspaper revealed in November 2024 that NHS hospitals were continuing to place job adverts for midwives who will “promote normality”, eight of which were placed in 2024. It also reported that safety investigators were expressing alarm that potentially dangerous attempts to discourage women from medical assistance during childbirth are widespread.[9]
In 2022 Gill Walton, head of the RCM apologised for its part in promoting “normal” births that contributed to the deaths of mothers and babies admitting that some midwives had promoted an ideology that had gone too far. However belief in the superiority “normal” births under different guises such as the recommendation of ineffective alternative or complementary therapies in lieu of standard medical approaches; for instance offering aromatherapy if labour isn’t progressing which is contrary to medical guidelines.[10] The most high profile use of alternative therapies involves Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London whose maternity department states that staff use reflexology and aromatherapy to avoid medical induction of labour. It asserts that such treatments are non-invasive and rarely cause the unpleasant or long-lasting side effects that can be associated with medication’
Nottingham
The nadir of NHS maternity care was, of course, the scandal in Nottingham NHS Trust uncovered over four years of investigation and delivered in coruscating detail and tone by Donna Ockenden in Juhne 2026. About 2,500 families and more than 800 members of staff contributed to the inquiry over that time period. Overall, experts concluded, there were “potentially avoidable” outcomes for mothers and babies in 444 maternity cases leading up to May 2025, alongside 76 neonatal cases. All these cases were graded as two or three for harm – with grade two representing “significant concerns” and grade three “major concerns” over care. Different care may have altered the outcome for 260 babies who died or were harmed. Of that number, 155 babies died, while 105 suffered serious injury due to substandard care, with some left with permanent brain damage.[11]
Experts found adverse outcomes were linked to multiple factors including failures in the monitoring of babies; poor interpretation of heart monitoring; a failure to recognise babies were in distress during labour and a failure to escalate some cases to senior clinicians. Systems of oversight “were no longer fit for purpose” and there was a toxic and bullying work culture. Women in the middle of labour were told to “pull themselves together” while another submission from a mother recalled being told to “wait their turn” as there were “other women they had to sort”.[12] These problems had been known about since 2010.
Natural birth ideology was likely a major contributory factor some of the mistakes that occurred, according to the husband of Sarah Hawkins whose baby Harriet died in childbirth in 2016. A telling of the whole harrowing experience that Sarah suffered leads to that unavoidable conclusion. Despite pleading on the phone repeatedly with her midwives during her six days of labour, she was told not to come to hospital and on the one occasion that she did come in, she was given analgesic medication and sent home. After parts of the membranes covering the baby started being expelled from the womb, the midwives on duty failed to treat this development as an emergency. Rather than being examined in order to determine if the membranes were concealing a trapped umbilical cord which would have cut off Harriet’s oxygen supply and so signalling the need for an emergency C-section, Sarah was taken to a midwife led birthing pool intended only for women at low risk. While the bath was being prepared for a water birth and the midwives were discussing what aromatherapy oils to add to the water, Harriet was probably dead or dying. She was delivered stillborn nine hours later.
An external review of the case found that staff had made 13 errors and concluded that the death was “almost entirely preventable”. A few weeks before this tragedy, a doctor had told the couple “Don’t let anyone medicalise your birth”. A clearer exposition of the promotion of ideology over the safety of mother and baby could be made.
The Ethnicity Pain Gap
Over and above these multiple failings in maternity care is a metric of institutional racism known as the ‘ethnicity pain gap’. Experts have found that skin pigmentation often determines whether one is offered in all areas of healthcare, not just maternity care. For example, according to top public health academic Devi Sridhar, in the domain of cancer treatment patients from Black, South Asian and mixed ethnic backgrounds received fewer and lower doses of pain-relieving medication than people from white European backgrounds, even after controlling for patient age, cancer type, health condition, deprivation and other variables that could affect that decision.[13]
On maternity care, Guardian research has established that black women in England are almost twice as likely to have their births investigated for safety failings compared with their white counterparts. Black women in the UK are almost three times more likely to die during childbirth. An interim report published by the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation included accounts of Asian women being stereotyped as “princesses”, with the implication that they were too demanding or unable to cope with pain, while black women were seen as having “tough” skin and able to tolerate pain.” The report also heard from black women who described experiences of being stereotyped as “the angry or aggressive black woman” which in turn affected their care. For example, in the words of one woman during a family evidence panel: “I feel like, for us black ladies, they feel like we can handle the pain, even when we are complaining we are in pain.”[14]
At the extreme end of the natural birth ideological continuum is the Free Birth Society (FBS), a multimillion-dollar organisation linked to baby deaths around the world, but whose founder Emilee Saldaya claims that during her time at the helm, she had “never heard of a woman dying in childbirth in the sovereign birth world”. Ten months after she made this grandiose claim in December 2024 on The Way Forward podcast, 30-year-old nutritionist, wellness influencer and first-time mother Stacey Warnecke, died from complications of a massive postpartum haemorrhage after a free birth attended by a Melbourne-based birth attendant or in FBS terminology “birth keeper” and friend and student of Saldaya, Emily Lal. It was one of two deaths in her five years as a birth keeper that Lal was to be named in; the other was of a newborn baby in 2022.[15]
Previously, a year-long Guardian investigation had identified 48 cases of late-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths or other forms of serious harm involving mothers or birth attendants who appeared to be linked to the US-based FBS. These cases were found in the US, Canada, Switzerland, France, South Africa, India, Australia and the UK. Now it tells the story of how Lal, a former insurance worker with no medical qualifications. She was trained by Saldaya and her business partner Yolande Norris-Clark, through their Radical Birth Keeper (RBK) school through a three month Zoom course where as one of 850 RBKs that they claim to have trained she was instructed in the art of brand-building through social media through the fog of scientific inaccuracies and dangerous misinformation.[16]
Among the pearls of wisdom inculcated to the students were that neonatal resuscitation can be a form of “sabotage”; that bacteria may not cause infection and that life-threatening pregnancy complications can be “variations of normal”. Norris-Clark and Saldaya have also, respectively, questioned the existence of gravity and whether the Earth is round. Experts who have reviewed the basic advice on dealing with emergencies given by FBS to trainee RBKs say it contains inaccurate, misleading and dangerous information. However in interviews on the Matrescence podcast in 2021 before the death of Ms Warnecke she appeared to suggest that she had the requisite lifesaving skills for emergency situations stating that:
Natural Birth Ideology
Natural Birth Ideology is the belief that physiological, low intervention birth is the ideal birth method. It emphasises vaginal birth without medical intervention such as induction, epidural or surgical procedures, viewing childbirth as a natural process, best supported by midwifery and minimal interference. Advocates argue that it respects the body’s natural rhythm, reduces unnecessary interventions and promotes maternal autonomy. The spectrum of this ideology ranges from informal, low-intervention birth to the Free Birth Society doctrine that all births should be physiological regardless of risk. Historically some beliefs about natural birth were influenced by moral or religious ideas, such as the notion that childbirth pain was a divine punishment. Modern natural birth ideology is grounded in the philosophy of salutogenesis and advocacy for physiological birth rather than moral judgment. It often advocates with midwifery led care models and home birth advocacy.[1]
Rigid adherence to natural birth ideology can conflict with medical care and informed patient choice. A particular imperative for supporters is the reduction of the need for caesarean sections to the bare minimum The prioritisation of ‘normal birth at call cost’ has had deleterious effects of standards of maternal and neonatal care within the NHS and its promotion has been identified by many of its critics as a significant factor in the series of maternity hospital care scandals that has riven the NHS in the opening decades of the 21st century, the most damning of which was senior midwife Donna Ockenden’s recently published four year report into the “cruel” and substandard care in maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. The ideological divide in the NHS over natural or ‘normal’ birth theory and practice has been acute. Amongst the numerous malpractices identified by Donna Ockenden that the “quest for normal birth” contributed to the avoidable harm and deaths of more than 500 women and babies. However in her national review of maternity care, Baroness Amos and her team “did not find that ‘normal’ birth ideology’ was currently widespread’. This conclusion led to the resignation of Bill Kirkup, one of her twelve clinical advisors and of Britain’s leading maternity investigators, from his role on the inquiry.[2]
NHS Maternity Services and Natural Birth Ideology
As alluded to earlier, caesarean or C-sections are a particular flashpoint in the Natural Births debate. From 2007 to 2017, the Royal College of Midwives advised that women should try to have a vaginal birth without surgical intervention, and NHS England told hospitals to try to reduce caesarean sections to about 20% of births. This “normal birth at any cost” culture was central to the scandal uncovered by Bill Kirkup in Morecambe Bay in 2015 where it was found that clinicians had ignored or failed to respond quickly enough to problems during childbirth. James Titcombe, whose son Joshua died of sepsis in 2008 after failures in the Morecambe Bay maternity scandal, said he believed natural birth ideology remained a “significant and widespread patient safety issue”, and that Amos’s review appeared to have “taken a superficial approach”.[3]
The hegemony of natural birth ideology and its effects on maternity patient care is laid out by Clare Wilson. She asserts that the best-known advocates of natural birth may be the National Childbirth Trust (NCT); she reports that those who attended NCT antenatal classes were discouraged by their teachers from seeking medical assistance. Less well known is that from the 1990s onwards the “natural” birth agenda was gaining ground among university researchers and campaigners and over the next decade it became baked into policy documents for midwives and doctors. A key development was the publication in 2012 of NHS guidelines produced in partnership with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) and the NCT which encouraged to boost their rate of “normal” births[4].
Called Focus on normal birth and reducing Caesarean section rates, it highlighted the UK’s rising C-section rates – 24 per cent in 2006 – and offered hospitals a range of measures to try to reduce them to 20 per cent and ideally 15 per cent. It claimed – without good evidence – that this would reduce rates of death and harm from childbirth as well as bringing the NHS financial savings. While the supposed premise of these guidelines was that it was better for mothers and babies to deliver vaginally, it was in reality a cost-cutting exercise according to an anonymously quoted former obstetrician.[5]
Wilson then details how the successive incidences of NHS maternity scandals took place in hospitals which had striven hardest for low C-section rates. First up was at Furness General Hospital in Morecambe Bay where 11 babies and one mother were found to have died needlessly the inquiry reported in 2015. According to Dr Bill Kirkup, one of the country’s leading maternity investigators, who led the inquiry “There was a growing mood amongst midwives to promote natural childbirth”[6]
Next came two similar maternity safety scandals at two linked hospitals in East Kent and Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital which for years had publicised its low C-section rate of 14 per cent compared with the national average of 23 per cent at the time. One East Kent mother said “I felt that … I was made to have a natural birth when an emergency C – section was more appropriate, just so they didn’t dent their precious natural birth rate”. Emily Barley whose baby Beatrice died at Barnsley Hospital in 2022 reported that every concern she raised was met with the rejoinder “It’s just normal birth, everything is OK”.[7]
Further evidence that ideology rather than patient health drove decision making especially in hospitals with extremely low C-sections but with higher rates of still births and neonatal deaths is provided by Dr Nadeem Maghal’s analysis of the ills at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. This Trust had the lowest rates of C-sections in the country between 2012 and 2023 but over the same period, its rate of stillbirths and newborn baby deaths were the worst nationally. Its own 2015 maternity strategy expected all parts of the service to actively promote “normal” birth ‘The home births team’s language emphasised that “birth” is a natural and physiological process.’[8]
Despite the mounting evidence of the harm being caused by the prioritising of “normal birth” at all costs culture, the ! newspaper revealed in November 2024 that NHS hospitals were continuing to place job adverts for midwives who will “promote normality”, eight of which were placed in 2024. It also reported that safety investigators were expressing alarm that potentially dangerous attempts to discourage women from medical assistance during childbirth are widespread.[9]
In 2022 Gill Walton, head of the RCM apologised for its part in promoting “normal” births that contributed to the deaths of mothers and babies admitting that some midwives had promoted an ideology that had gone too far. However belief in the superiority “normal” births under different guises such as the recommendation of ineffective alternative or complementary therapies in lieu of standard medical approaches; for instance offering aromatherapy if labour isn’t progressing which is contrary to medical guidelines.[10] The most high profile use of alternative therapies involves Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London whose maternity department states that staff use reflexology and aromatherapy to avoid medical induction of labour. It asserts that such treatments are non-invasive and rarely cause the unpleasant or long-lasting side effects that can be associated with medication’
Nottingham
The nadir of NHS maternity care was, of course, the scandal in Nottingham NHS Trust uncovered over four years of investigation and delivered in coruscating detail and tone by Donna Ockenden in Juhne 2026. About 2,500 families and more than 800 members of staff contributed to the inquiry over that time period. Overall, experts concluded, there were “potentially avoidable” outcomes for mothers and babies in 444 maternity cases leading up to May 2025, alongside 76 neonatal cases. All these cases were graded as two or three for harm – with grade two representing “significant concerns” and grade three “major concerns” over care. Different care may have altered the outcome for 260 babies who died or were harmed. Of that number, 155 babies died, while 105 suffered serious injury due to substandard care, with some left with permanent brain damage.[11]
Experts found adverse outcomes were linked to multiple factors including failures in the monitoring of babies; poor interpretation of heart monitoring; a failure to recognise babies were in distress during labour and a failure to escalate some cases to senior clinicians. Systems of oversight “were no longer fit for purpose” and there was a toxic and bullying work culture. Women in the middle of labour were told to “pull themselves together” while another submission from a mother recalled being told to “wait their turn” as there were “other women they had to sort”.[12] These problems had been known about since 2010.
Natural birth ideology was likely a major contributory factor some of the mistakes that occurred, according to the husband of Sarah Hawkins whose baby Harriet died in childbirth in 2016. A telling of the whole harrowing experience that Sarah suffered leads to that unavoidable conclusion. Despite pleading on the phone repeatedly with her midwives during her six days of labour, she was told not to come to hospital and on the one occasion that she did come in, she was given analgesic medication and sent home. After parts of the membranes covering the baby started being expelled from the womb, the midwives on duty failed to treat this development as an emergency. Rather than being examined in order to determine if the membranes were concealing a trapped umbilical cord which would have cut off Harriet’s oxygen supply and so signalling the need for an emergency C-section, Sarah was taken to a midwife led birthing pool intended only for women at low risk. While the bath was being prepared for a water birth and the midwives were discussing what aromatherapy oils to add to the water, Harriet was probably dead or dying. She was delivered stillborn nine hours later.
An external review of the case found that staff had made 13 errors and concluded that the death was “almost entirely preventable”. A few weeks before this tragedy, a doctor had told the couple “Don’t let anyone medicalise your birth”. A clearer exposition of the promotion of ideology over the safety of mother and baby could be made.
The Ethnicity Pain Gap
Over and above these multiple failings in maternity care is a metric of institutional racism known as the ‘ethnicity pain gap’. Experts have found that skin pigmentation often determines whether one is offered in all areas of healthcare, not just maternity care. For example, according to top public health academic Devi Sridhar, in the domain of cancer treatment patients from Black, South Asian and mixed ethnic backgrounds received fewer and lower doses of pain-relieving medication than people from white European backgrounds, even after controlling for patient age, cancer type, health condition, deprivation and other variables that could affect that decision.[13]
On maternity care, Guardian research has established that black women in England are almost twice as likely to have their births investigated for safety failings compared with their white counterparts. Black women in the UK are almost three times more likely to die during childbirth. An interim report published by the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation included accounts of Asian women being stereotyped as “princesses”, with the implication that they were too demanding or unable to cope with pain, while black women were seen as having “tough” skin and able to tolerate pain.” The report also heard from black women who described experiences of being stereotyped as “the angry or aggressive black woman” which in turn affected their care. For example, in the words of one woman during a family evidence panel: “I feel like, for us black ladies, they feel like we can handle the pain, even when we are complaining we are in pain.”[14]
At the extreme end of the natural birth ideological continuum is the Free Birth Society (FBS), a multimillion-dollar organisation linked to baby deaths around the world, but whose founder Emilee Saldaya claims that during her time at the helm, she had “never heard of a woman dying in childbirth in the sovereign birth world”. Ten months after she made this grandiose claim in December 2024 on The Way Forward podcast, 30-year-old nutritionist, wellness influencer and first-time mother Stacey Warnecke, died from complications of a massive postpartum haemorrhage after a free birth attended by a Melbourne-based birth attendant or in FBS terminology “birth keeper” and friend and student of Saldaya, Emily Lal. It was one of two deaths in her five years as a birth keeper that Lal was to be named in; the other was of a newborn baby in 2022.[15]
Previously, a year-long Guardian investigation had identified 48 cases of late-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths or other forms of serious harm involving mothers or birth attendants who appeared to be linked to the US-based FBS. These cases were found in the US, Canada, Switzerland, France, South Africa, India, Australia and the UK. Now it tells the story of how Lal, a former insurance worker with no medical qualifications. She was trained by Saldaya and her business partner Yolande Norris-Clark, through their Radical Birth Keeper (RBK) school through a three month Zoom course where as one of 850 RBKs that they claim to have trained she was instructed in the art of brand-building through social media through the fog of scientific inaccuracies and dangerous misinformation.[16]
Among the pearls of wisdom inculcated to the students were that neonatal resuscitation can be a form of “sabotage”; that bacteria may not cause infection and that life-threatening pregnancy complications can be “variations of normal”. Norris-Clark and Saldaya have also, respectively, questioned the existence of gravity and whether the Earth is round. Experts who have reviewed the basic advice on dealing with emergencies given by FBS to trainee RBKs say it contains inaccurate, misleading and dangerous information. However in interviews on the Matrescence podcast in 2021 before the death of Ms Warnecke she appeared to suggest that she had the requisite lifesaving skills for emergency situations stating that:
If there was excessive bleeding or something out of the ordinary occurred that we considered to be a variation of normal, I’ve got the skills behind me to help the woman to birth her baby if she wants my help[17]
These stories of catastrophic midwifery misadventures are salutary tales of what can happen when ideology trumps medical care prerogatives. The saga of the use of puberty blockers in the Tavistock clinic is another. Medical dilemmas and controversies should always be framed and solved within a public health discourse. It is to be hoped that Nottingham and other maternity health scandals in the NHS will lead to a definitive step change in that direction.
References
[1] Copilot
[2] Hannah Barnes, 2026. Out of the Ordinary. The Amos Review cannot fix our broken maternity system. I’m not sure what can, The New Statesman 3-9 July p.31
[3] James Tapper, 2026. Maternity crisis: calls to investigate if ‘natural birth ideology’ has put mothers at risk. The Observer 5 July pp.6-7
[4] Clare Wilson, 2024. How the battle over ‘normal’ births is still damaging NHS maternity care. The I Paper 25 September.
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Dr Nadeem Maghal, 2025. Natural Birth at All Costs Is an Ideology, Not a Care Model. Strasys 29 November.
[9] Wilson, op cit
[10] Ibid
[11] Gavin Bevis, 2026. Baby deaths and toxic culture – the Nottingham maternity report at a glance BBC News Nottinghamshire. 24 June 2026.
[12] Ibid
[13] Devi Sridhar, 2026. The ‘ethnicity pain gap’ is real and fixable. The Guardian Journal. 3 July.
[14] Tobi Thomas, 2026. From birth until death. How the pain gap lasts for a lifetime. The Guardian 3 July 2026 pp. 14-15
[15] Sirin Kale and Melissa Davey 2026. Freebirths. How a ‘birth keeper’ was named in the inquests into two deaths. The Guardian 1 July pp.30-31
[16] Ibid, p.30
[17] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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