UK midwives love to claim they are the “guardians of normal birth.”
Type “guardians of normal birth” into Google and you get page after page of midwives declaring their commitment to a specific vision of birth.
I’m not sure why they boast because it’s actually an unwitting indictment of the moral rot at the heart of UK midwifery. It’s also the root cause of yet another midwifery scandal roiling the UK, this time as a result of the Ockenden Report.
It is fundamentally unethical for any health provider to pose as a guardian of a procedure. It would be wrong for a surgeon to pose as a guardian of appendectomy; it would call into question his or her ability to successfully and ethically treat abdominal pain when he had a clear bias toward removing appendices. It doesn’t matter that the surgeon believes appendectomy is always the appropriate treatment for abdominal pain, and we would quite rightly suspect that the surgeon has his own self-interest (the surgical fee, the opportunity to hone skills, the enjoyment of performing surgery) at heart.
Similarly, if a dermatologist claimed that she was a guardian of Botox, it would call into question her ability to recommend appropriate treatment for her patients. It doesn’t matter if the dermatologist believes that every patient could benefit from an injection of Botox. We would quite rightly suspect that the dermatologist had her own self-interest (her fee, gifts from the drug company, opportunity to serve as a paid consultant for Botox)at heart.
When a midwife claims to be a guardian of normal birth, it calls into question her ability to successfully and ethically care for pregnant women. It doesn’t matter if the midwife believes that normal birth is beneficial for nearly every women. We would quite rightly suspect that she had her own self-interest (her fee, professional autonomy, the enjoyment of assisting an unmedicated vaginal delivery) at heart.
Midwives’ commitment to unmedicated vaginal birth means that complications are more likely to be ignored or denied. Treatment options are rated by whether or not they are “promote normality,” not based on their likelihood of ensuring the health of mothers and babies. A particularly distasteful consequence of privileging unmedicated vaginal birth is the failure to investigate injuries and deaths. Instead of root cause analysis, midwives “guarding” normal birth may supress investigations and ban questioning.
UK midwives need to take a long hard look at the moral rot of a philosophy that privileges birth process over healthy mothers and healthy babies. Rather than patting themselves on the back for being guardians of normal birth, they should be ashamed to be caught out promoting a philosophy that places how a baby is born on an equal or greater footing than whether that baby lives or dies.
