Leading article: Birth and death
Thursday, 10 July 2008
There could scarcely be a better advert for choosing a home birth. A study by the Healthcare Commission into maternity care in the NHS has uncovered some startling discrepancies in the service available to pregnant women in English hospitals. In some, a single bed is used for more than one birth every 24 hours. In others, there is also a shortage of basic facilities such as baths, showers and lavatories.
The Government plainly needs to pay more attention to the quality of care available in maternity units. Many women will never be more reliant on the NHS than when they are giving birth. If this experience is not up to scratch, they will ask with ever-more urgency where their taxes are going.
But improving maternity facilities is not just necessary to increase patient comfort. It is a medical imperative too. Giving birth is safer than it has ever been, but a single mistake by medical staff can still be catastrophic. The NHS handed over £259m in obstetric negligence payments in 2005-06. And the negligence bill has been rising in recent years.
According to the Confidential Enquiry into Stillbirths and Deaths in Infancy, substandard care is to blame for two-thirds of deaths during labour. More than half of these lives could be saved with greater supervision and better management.
The message could not be clearer: any official or ministerial complacency about the state of care in our maternity units would be scandalously inappropriate.
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(1) Give parliamentary constituencies the two members they always used to have, only require one of the two to be female.
(2) Restore the hereditaries to the upper house, but only after abolitioning sex-biased primogeniture (for all, including the royals).
That would give 50% female MPs in the Lords within a generation. Only then will gender-specific issues get dealt with adequately.
(3) Deprive all religious organizations of the right to sex discriminate: the C of E row about women bishops will then cease to be moot.
These are not my ideas but those of my late feminist godmother (1898-1977) who was going to have my christened after two militant suffragette friends until I arrived the wrong sex, but strongly influenced my early education all the same.
I witnessed home births in 1933 and 1965 and for long thought they were normal. For a male they were certainly a necessary part of my education.
Posted by Laurence Hallewell | 10.07.08, 06:53 GMT