‘Girls must prepare for motherhood’
For Gill Walton, head of Britain’s midwives, modern attitudes to birth get much wrong, she tells Rosa Silverman
Earlier this month, a Mumsnet user by the name “Baby1onboard11” kicked off a new thread: “I’m due my first baby in six weeks and was hoping someone might have a positive birth experience to share? I’ve heard enough horror stories to last a lifetime and would love to hear from those who’ve had a really positive birthing experience.”
Almost two dozen people responded, reassuring the mother to-be with their tales of straightforward – and, in one case, even “fantastic” – labours.
Gill Walton would have approved. The chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) longs to see more positive birth stories being shared publicly to counterbalance the steady stream of negative ones. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the latter – gory, painful, terrifying – that tend to spread fastest and widest. And this, it has been suggested, is having damaging consequences.
The same day as that Mumsnet discussion, Catriona Jones, a lecturer in midwifery at the University of Hull, posited that harrowing tales shared via online forums were driving a fear of childbirth.
Up to 14 per cent of expectant mothers, she said, now suffer from this intense anxiety, known as tocophobia. “I think it’s always happened,” says Walton of the sharing of birth horror stories. “It’s just that social media makes it more public.
“If you say, ‘I was really well in my pregnancy, went into labour, my baby came out and I breastfed for six months and [everything was] hunky dory,’ what a boring story is that? But it’s not, it’s a great story! We want more of those.”
Walton, a mother of two and proud new grandmother of one (she shows me a picture of her daughter’s son, Barnaby, on her phone) has been in the job for exactly a year when we meet at the RCM headquarters in central London, ahead of its annual conference this week.
Around the same time last year, I interviewed Walton’s predecessor, Cathy Warwick, who argued that modern mothers were being exploited through expensive hypnobirthing courses, pregnancy yoga classes, private ultrasound parties, and so on.
Walton is more circumspect. “I think it’s about women being able to explore what they want for themselves, because everyone’s different,” she says. “If you want whale music, fine! Have whale music at your caesarean birth, or water birth, or normal birth. Is there any harm in that? There absolutely is not.”
But how much choice do women really have? Research, published last month by the childbirth charity Birthrights, has suggested women at three quarters of maternity units in Britain were being denied the right to choose a caesarean birth.
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) guidelines say that women who request a caesarean should be offered it, if – after support and discussion with a doctor – they feel it is best. But the report found that only 26 per cent of health trusts were abiding by the guidelines, with many women facing difficulties when requesting a C-section on non-medical grounds. Moreover, recent figures compiled by caesareanbirth.org found that half of maternity units had been set targets to reduce caesareans, a practice campaigners have described as “outright dangerous”.
Walton says she’s doesn’t understand how units can follow such targets: “It depends on the local population – so if you’ve got a population with high levels of diabetes, for example, the caesarean rate will be higher. I think it’s quite difficult to say there should be a target for reduction.”
Added to which, “there are probably