Sir Jeremy Hunt

I thank my hon. Friend for that very powerful personal experience. I am concerned about this idea of women being moved from having no team to a high-risk team, because it cannot always be known in advance if someone is high risk. It is knowing every woman’s situation continuously that enables a team to understand whether she is deteriorating and whether, therefore, she is in need of specialist help. The third reason we still have this problem after all this time is the one I really want to focus on: the ideological obsession that still exists in some parts of the NHS with so-called natural or normal birth. That leads to the promotion of vaginal birth over and above C-sections in a way that, all too often, sees interventions and escalations happen too late, and mothers and babies die. I do not ask the House to take my word for it, as some of the reports have commented on this issue. Bill Kirkup, who did the Morecambe Bay report, said that maternity services at Furness general hospital “became strongly influenced by a small number of dominant individuals whose over-zealous pursuit of the natural childbirth approach led at times to inappropriate and unsafe care.” Donna Ockenden told the Select Committee about Shrewsbury and Telford: “We have spoken to hundreds of women who said to us that they felt pressured to have a normal birth. My clinical team said they have seen examples, even in situations where a normal birth in their own hospital would be contraindicated, of women being pressured”. She said there was “a multi-professional…focus on normal birth at pretty much any cost.” Again, at the launch of the Nottingham inquiry, Donna Ockenden said there were hundreds of cases where “the quest for normal birth continued. And avoidance of intervention persisted”. Finally, in Leeds, Fiona Winser-Ramm told The Times she was convinced that “normal birth” ideology played a part in the death of her daughter, Aliona.