It’s tremendous vindication of everything I’ve been writing for years, but tragically it has come too late for countless babies, mothers and families.
The Royal College of Midwives has finally, FINALLY, been forced to end its Campaign for Normal Birth in abject failure. Oh, they successfully promoted “normal birth” alright. But they repeatedly sacrificed the lives of babies and mothers on the altar of unmedicated vaginal birth. British health authorities ultimately called a halt to the madness.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Morally bankrupt, blood drenched midwifery leaders, like RCM head Cathy Warwick and midwife Sheena Byrom, never cared about dead babies and I suspect they still don’t give a damn.[/pullquote]
As Clare Wilson, writing in The New Scientist, explains in Why Midwives are back-pedaling on natural childbirth:
In May, the UK’s Royal College of Midwives (RCM) quietly cancelled a long-standing campaign to promote natural births. Separately, doctors are beginning their own more proactive approach to ensuring interventions happen as soon as they are needed. And campaigners have formed a new pressure group called “Maternity Outcomes Matter” to ensure all healthcare staff prioritise safety over the process of childbirth.
What happened?
While it is sensible to avoid medical interference where possible, take this approach too far and childbirth becomes more dangerous, leading to brain-damaged babies and avoidable deaths.
Some of these occurred when women were denied caesarean sections even after begging for them.
It’s not as though these tragedies weren’t completely foreseeable. I first wrote about the Campaign’s death toll in October 2011 (Promoting normal birth is killing babies and mothers):
For years, the Royal College of Midwives in the UK has been on a relentless campaign to promote “normal birth.” We are now seeing the results, and they are nothing short of horrific.
Last month the focus was on Furness General Hospital in Cumbria where 6 babies and 2 mothers have died preventable deaths …
Lest anyone is tempted to conclude that this is a problem restricted to a single hospital, today’s newspaper reports demolish such wishful thinking…
Four women and seven newborns are believed to have died in the last 12 months on labour wards at the [Essex] trust’s hospitals.
But the RCM continued to promote their deadly ideology and babies continued to die.
In 2012 I reported on the financial consequences:
The 5.5 million babies born in England between 1 April 2000 to 31 March 2010, resulted in 5,087 maternity claims, involving payouts of £3.1bn, including legal fees…
The most frequent mistakes cited in claims involved management of labour including failure to recognise the baby was in distress from fetal heart monitoring equipment or delay in acting; caesarean section including mistakes and delays and cerebral palsy, where the baby is starved of oxygen at birth and sustains brain damage, often requiring life-long care…
The report said: “Unfortunately, many of the same errors are still being repeated.”
But the RCM continued to promote their deadly ideology and babies continued to die.
In 2015, the Kirkup report on the deaths more than a dozen babies and mothers at at Morecambe Bay was issued and it was a catalog of horrors.
Referring to the 5 deaths in 2008 alone, the report noted:
All showed evidence of the same problems of poor clinical competence, insufficient recognition of risk, inappropriate pursuit of normal childbirth and failures of team-working…
The midwives at Furness general were so cavalier they became known as “the musketeers”.
But the RCM continued to promote their deadly ideology and babies continued to die.
A different report published later in the year highlighted the fact that NHS errors leave 1,300 babies dead or maimed.
The NHS paid or set aside just under £1 billion [$1.5 billion] last year to settle 1,316 claims of negligence in maternity units, up from £488 million a decade ago, data from the NHS Litigation Authority show. The most costly claims involve babies brain-damaged during labour, who will require constant care for the rest of their lives.
One basic error accounts for a quarter of payouts, with campaigners saying it was a “scandal” that the health service was failing to learn from its mistakes. They blamed divisions between midwives and doctors, saying that the desire for “natural” births — without interventions — sometimes went too far…
But the RCM continued to promote their deadly ideology and babies continued to die.
And the financial costs continued to rise.
In May of this year The Guardian described a new report on liability:
The number of claims for brain damage and cerebral palsy has tripled in a decade, amid widespread monitoring failures…
… Since 2004/5, the value of claims against NHS maternity units for brain damage and cerebral palsy has risen from £354m to £990m, official figures show.
The cases – often linked with a failure to monitor babies’ heart rates, to detect risks of oxygen starvation – fuelled maternity negligence claims of more than £1.2bn in 2015/16 [$1.5 billion].
I asked at that time: how many babies have to die and how many billions of pounds have to be paid out before the morally repugnant, incompetently trained, self-dealing, deadly UK midwives are held to account?
That liability report appears to have been a tipping point. That was when the Campaign to Promote Normal Birth was quietly shuttered. The fact that the RCM has been silent suggests they hadn’t learned a damn thing and were pressured by higher authorities.
As Wilson notes in her New Scientist piece:
Thankfully, the bad RCM advice has now been taken down, although it’s a shame the midwives’ leaders have tried to do this quietly…
Back-pedalling on the quiet means news will spread more slowly to grassroots midwives and schools of midwifery. There is great variation in practice, and while there are many excellent midwives who prioritise safety, there are also those who may resist change.
If the RCM genuinely wants to reduce avoidable bereavements, it should shout about its change of heart from the rooftops. Most people think of medicine as a field where decisions are guided by evidence rather than ideology. That should be true for childbirth too.
I doubt the RCM has had a change of heart. Their morally bankrupt, blood drenched leaders, especially RCM head Cathy Warwick and midwife Sheila Byrom, have never cared about dead babies and dead mothers in the past and I suspect they couldn’t care less now, either.
The Campaign for Normal Birth was always at heart a campaign to benefit midwives, babies and mothers be damned. It was always about full employment, higher salaries and greater professional autonomy for midwives. If countless babies and mothers had to die to achieve that, Cathy Warwick, Sheena Byrom and the Royal College of Midwives were willing to let them pay the price.
