Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of babies and mothers died because of the Royal College of Midwives Campaign for Normal Birth.
Finally, FINALLY, the Royal College of Midwives has apologized.
In todays Times of London:
The head of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) today apologises for its part in promoting “normal” births that contributed to the deaths of mothers and babies.
Gill Walton said some midwives had turned legitimate efforts to improve maternity care into a dangerous ideology that had gone too far.
She said some controversial aspects of its normal, or vaginal, birth campaign, which started in 2008, were not evidence-based. The campaign included a list of ten tips for midwives on how to achieve a normal birth, which advised them to “wait and see” and “trust your intuition” during labour.
These deaths weren’t merely entirely predictable (I predicted them as far back as the very beginning of the campaign), but they became manifest as early as 2011. Despite confirmation from multiple government reports over the following years the death toll and the liability costs continued to rise. By 2017 nearly $3.5 BILLION was paid out in a single year, amounting to 20% of the entire maternity budget!
But many UK midwives are still in denial and Walton expects “hate mail” from these influential midwives.
Walton said there remained a small number of midwives for whom normal birth had become an ideology, adding: “There will be a tiny minority that won’t be happy [with what I have said], and they will respond quite negatively. In the past, I have had hate mail where we have made our position really clear.”
She agreed influential midwives were still pushing the agenda, saying: “What worries me is if a group of people promote normal birth as better than another form of birth, that’s not putting women at the centre of care.
In addition to predicted the hideous toll of infant and maternal deaths I also predicted this apology as far back as 2015.
As I wrote publicly to a group of prominent midwives at the time:
Your behavior is unethical, immoral, self-serving and harms innocents. I don’t know how many babies and mothers will have to die before midwives will be held to account, but I do know that the day of reckoning is coming.
That day is here.
