The trauma of giving birth left me clueless and scared

Despite all of Clara Doran’s training as a GP who’s delivered babies and counselled new mums, she wasn’t prepared for the birth of her child. More alarmingly, neither was the NHS

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You always remember hearing your first birth story. While I'd been privy as a GP to snippets of tales from the labour ward, it was the story from one of my oldest school friends that imprinted itself on my brain. “I was alone for hours... Andrew had to go to get the midwife, but by the time she came back, it was too late for pain relief.”

Four years later, it was my turn. By now, more friends had become mums. Thanks to their feverishly regaled horror stories, I could now add delivering at 30 weeks, obstetric cholestasis and severe postpartum haemorrhage to my ever-expanding list of worries about giving birth. But I’d be OK, I was a doctor after all. And yet, and yet... there I was now, days past my due date, decorating our nursery with stickers, saying the words to my husband I'd been holding onto for most of my pregnancy: “What if I die giving birth?”

Was this irrational fear, or was I justified in being scared?

I have worked in healthcare for all my working life, and despite working alongside so many people determined to care and do good work, there was one statistic that I could not ignore. Maternal mortality in the UK has increased by 27 per cent between 2009 and 2022. Even considering the impact of Covid, this figure has increased by 10 per cent. Asian and Black women are two and three times more likely to die than white women, respectively.

When my waters broke at the stroke of midnight, two things immediately struck me. Firstly, that is a lot of fluid. Secondly, from my junior doctor experience, I knew the early hours of Sunday morning were the absolute worst time to become a patient, thanks to shift patterns and weekend resource issues.