Maternity services. Volume II, Minutes of evidence.

Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Health Committee

Date:: 1992

Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Maternity services. Volume II, Minutes of evidence. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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16 January 1992] [Continued [Audrey Wise Cont] and normal the vast majority of births are. It is all risk, risk, risk. (Ms Hedderwick) Also particularly in London—I do not know how different it is in the country (obviously if you are in the countryside and not ina town you are not going to beso near a hospital)—you can be very, very near a hospital and ifa risk situation seems to be developing the midwives are very quick to alert you and the hospital to the problems and take you into hospital if you need intervention or special care. 1577. That is a very interesting point because that matter of transfer is often used as if it means that therefore you should be in hospital all the time because you might be transferred there. Do you feel that that is a proper conclusion? (Ms Hedderwick) | think in the situation of my first baby’s birth, if I had been in hospital from the start, I would have had a great deal more intervention than I ended up with. I had a labour of 48 hours start to finish and I was at home for about 40 hours of that and it was not progressing fast enough in the midwives’ opinion. They thought I needed more sensitive monitoring, which I had in hospital, and possibly a drip to speed contractions up, and that is all I ended up having. I had a perfectly natural delivery. 1578. You did not wish you had been in hospital to start with? (Ms Hedderwick) What I was coming round to say is, even if I had been in hospital from the start of my labour (and I believe St Thomas’s does have time management of birth policy), had I been in earlier, I would have been on a drip earlier and still might not have progressed at the required speed and got full dilation at the required time and possibly could have gone to forceps or even caesarian birth. I know people who have had very slow first labour who have been on drip and had a caesarian birth. It is an imagined scenario but that could have happened to me. So I was better off starting at home. Mr Sims 1579. You ladies are almost by definition the odd ones out, you are the minority because you felt you not only wanted to have babies at home but you would stick your neck out and insist on it. You obviously have friends who have taken a different course. I think, Mrs Gartland, you said your friends thought you were very brave, and you thought they were brave going into hospital. Amongst your friends do you feel that they go into hospital because they really want to, because they are reluctant to stick to their ground in the way you have, or simply because, as I think Mrs Nash was implying, this is the culture, the accepted thing and that, even if home birth were offered to them on a plate, they would still prefer to go into hospital? (Ms Gartland) I think they go into hospital because they are scared of being at home because they think they need everything that is available in the hospital. 1580. Somebody puts this idea into their head? (Ms Gartland) | think that is a cultural thing, yes. 1581. You said you do not want to do anything to endanger the life of your baby and, if what everybody is telling you is that you should be in hospital because that is the safest place, then that is where most people are going to go? (Ms Gartland) Yes. We are the minority. For some reason we did not feel happy with that and we all researched it and we were all confident that it was not safer, not for a normal birth, and that there is no reason why we should not have a normal birth unless somebody comes up with a reason—that sort of thing. (Ms Robinson) 1 have friends who feel envious really of my birth experiences. I remember meeting one woman who was wanting to do an article on women’s experiences of birth and was trying to find women with positive birth experiences and she could not find any. This is in Brixton. Every woman she spoke to did not have a positive experience; I was the first woman she had spoken to to have a positive birth history. My experience of talking to other women is that when they hear about mine they feel jealous, nevertheless I still think there are quite a lot of women who, .like you said, would still go into hospital because the professional image, everything you get from the professionals, is that being at home is risky and not what you should be doing. Sir David Price 1582. We were asking you earlier on quite a bit about the professional advice you were getting and these sorts of consequences, but I wonder how far discussion with other women, with your chums, is not quite an important thing in people’s decisions. I have one parish in the Southampton area where they are very strong on home delivery, and if not home delivery a GP unit. There the people are mums who have done it and they have an influence. Move two miles away and you get what is now the traditional, play-safe step of going into an obstetric unit. But in that particular parish, Fair Oak, it has been mum and midwife led and I think the GPs have just had to follow because that has been a very strong view for first-time mums, first pregnancies, to follow that. because they talk to other mums who have said “‘This is a much more beautiful experience’”’—all the things you are saying. I think this whole question of what your own friends, your own circle, are doing is a terribly important factor. I do not know if you agree with that. (Ms Gartland) The day after he was born a lot of friends came round, women. A lot of my friends already have one or two children and they were fascinated and the ones that want more children are saying, “Well, I think maybe I will go for a home birth next time’, because it was so good, they could see all the advantages. (Ms Hedderwick) | think it does have an influence, but I found that not many people I knew had babies at the time and nobody I knew had a home birth, but people have talked about it since I had the home birth. Mine was from the influence of my mother who had all her children at home; that was long ago and it was also what was done more than going into hospital, but that is the influence of another woman’s experience which is the important thing. But also I found people who were around St Thomas’s had not even considered it, which points to the lack of choice;