Think hospitals are safe for mothers? You're not listening

Jennifer Cahill and her baby daughter, Agnes, should still be alive. It is a story I have watched unfold with horror and heartbreak.

- LUCY HUNTER FORD

The coroner’s findings, published last week, are clear: a young mother, 34, died along with her baby after choosing to have a home birth and might have been saved if she was taken to North Manchester General Hospital earlier. The birth was catastrophically mismanaged from the outset. If she had been in a hospital, the specific mistakes that led to her death would likely have been caught.

Instead, a young boy is growing up without his mother and a husband is left without his wife and child, after an appalling catalogue of errors and negligent care, inflicted during a home birth that went terrifyingly, fatally wrong.

But it matters, profoundly, why she wanted to give birth at home. It wasn't recklessness, or arrogance, or an imagined "cult of natural birth". It was fear of giving birth in an NHS hospital. "I found Jen's desire for a home birth was linked to trauma from her first pregnancy," the report reads. This double tragedy - the senseless, desperate devastation of it - began there. That is why a narrative that stops at "home birth is bad and hospital birth is good" is a reductive polarity and one that entirely misses the point.

The answer to a system that traumatises women isn't to trap them in it, it's to fix it. If you still believe that hospitals are automatically safe places to give birth, then you're simply not listening.

Let me remind you of the uncomfortable, disgraceful facts: a recent Care Quality Commission report showed that more than two-thirds of all maternity units are deemed unsafe, the worst levels since records began in 2018. Up to 45 per cent of women describe their birth experience as traumatic, and one in 10 experience PTSD symptoms - that is up to 30,000 women every single year in the UK.