Midwives want childbirth to be miraculous — what went wrong in Nottingham?

Childbirth is often described as mother nature’s stunning con trick: the worst thing you can imagine, then somehow the pain fades. What tends to linger, though, is how the midwives treated you. Even in the most extreme moments, you notice if staff are scornful.

Panorama focused on the maternity unit run by Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, the subject of the largest maternity inquiry in NHS history, spanning 13 years from 2012 and covering 2,500 families. The programme presented alarming details: “FOH” written on a whiteboard beside women’s names, shorthand for “fuck off home”; accounts of senior midwives advising colleagues not to be “too kind”; and a case in which a woman was discouraged from coming in until her baby had died and her perineum and vaginal wall had collapsed.

Every woman in those situations could sense, even when unable to read her notes, that someone wanted her to “fuck off”. The relationship between someone in labour and the midwife has a built-in adversarial edge.

United Kingdom, Nottingham

midwives, childbirth, nottingham, maternity unit, nhs trust, maternity inquiry, panorama, foh, perineum, labour