Too posh to push? Try the pain of a £1,000 ‘ baby tax’ instead ...

NEWSFLASH! There is nothing natural about childbirth. Or at least in my experience anyway. I’ve done it three times in NHS hospitals, and each time it’s been a brutal barnyard trip to Herriot country. Men stick their arms inside you up to the elbow as you bellow like a cow, you are impaled on forceps as large as oars, cut open… it’s floorto-ceiling gore. Robbie Williams summed up the experience of witnessing his wife Ayda give birth to their first child as ‘like watching my favourite pub burn down’. Yup. That sounds about right.

My first child was born after a 36-hour labour that ended in theatre (forceps). My second was a 12-hour labour followed by an emergency caesarean because the baby was in a rare presentation called ‘face/brow’. Only my third was a two-hour quickie without analgesia (I knew the epidural I was screaming for was off the table when the midwife said ‘The anaesthetist is on his way’… then winked).

Frankly, I would have put a bullet in my head if someone had passed me a gun each time, but in those days doctor knew best. If you were lucky, you had a lovely baby at the end of it. That seemed a reasonable deal when I was giving birth towards the end of the last century.

It is why I was shocked to my core to see headlines last week about three-quarters of hospitals denying women the right to caesareans. No, not shocked by the bad behaviour of the NHS trusts in refusing the ops. Shocked by the fact that women are entitled to demand elective C-sections in the absence of medical reasons in the first place. Why would anyone want junior delivered t hr o ugh t he s unroof – sounds larky but a C-section is major abdominal surgery – if the regular exit is in service? I’m not pretending that two of my births weren’t blue-light-flashing bloodbaths, but after a C-section you can’t walk, drive, even sit up at the beginning (I remember a midwife shouting, ‘Feed baby! Feed baby!’ but I was hooked to a morphine pump and in too much pain to hold her). Presumably, the reason the C-section has had to become available on demand is because so many women are terrified of giving birth: they’re frightened of the wear and tear to their bodies, the One Born Every Minute splatter movie that is childbirth, and above all, the loss of control (as mothers will know, the words ‘birth plan’ are a laughable oxymoron).

IF YOU go into labour naturally ( sic), it’s pot luck: babies are often born in the middle of the night, the NHS is short-staffed, a smooth Rolls-Royce experience is not always on the cards. With a planned elective C- section, you know that you will be guaranteed medical attention and pain relief, and at a specified time.

Here’s my solution. If a woman wants, rather than needs, a caesarean, she should, I suppose, have it. But if she doesn’t have it privately, she should pay the difference – a C-section costs at least £1,000 more than a normal delivery – to the maternity services of the NHS, to improve the experience for everyone: mums, midwives, babies, fathers too.

Be too posh to push by all means – but on your dime, not mine.