Women in the UK are more than twice as likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth as those in Poland, Austria or Belarus, according to Save the Children.
We’ve proven that natural childbirth, as the midwives tend to insist upon, is a good idea then have we?
TBF, reproduction is safest in normal weight twenty year olds who have attended regular antenatal checkups. Minority women who have to shroud up to leave the house under escort tend to present in labour, their anatomy complicated by fgm. The indigenous population, bar welfare careerists, leave childbearing until they are fat and past their physiological prime. Then there are some truly evil midwives who guard their territory from doctors.
Have we?
I seriously doubt the data is accurate enough (not to mention must have been collected very differently in different places) to draw anything other than the broadest of conclusions. Europe good, Africa bad, no surprise.
On the day the forces of the left are screaming about NHS “cuts”!
Bu88er the patients, they only pay the bills. And another confection of lefty outrage.
Like a rash, up pops the Common Purpose driven Labour supporting ‘Save the children’ telling us some old claptrap about birth survival rates in Belarus and are they living in a parallel universe?
But never is there any mention insofar as NHS finances are concerned – of Mcruin’s multi £billion PFI splurge on new build hospitals, um selective memory kicked in again?
Oh no, it’s heads in the sand Staffordshire trust – whats the problem Andy Burnham and 13 years of Labour is nothing to do wiv the NHS budgetary black hole………….
Or, how about hundreds of minions rushing about worrying about the “future effects of climate change on patients” – a bloated bureaucracy – the NHS – are you kidding?
Then, the hundreds of taxpayer funded Unite and Unison reps running about all day worrying about the crucially important stuff, of diversity and prayer rooms facing east + ethnicity quotas on NHS staff rolls.
Important work and there’s no money for the little things – including bay- bees.
If I understand the report, the figure for maternal health was a number representing the probability of a 15 year old dying whilst pregnant or in childbirth over the term of her fertile life. Countries like Ireland and the UK with higher pregnancy (and birth rates) than Poland and Norway
http://www.savethechildren.org/atf/cf/%7B9def2ebe-10ae-432c-9bd0-df91d2eba74a%7D/SOWM_2015.PDF
… (continued from above) will naturally have a higher chance of dying while pregnant (from any cause) or during childbirth
Tangentially related, did you see the FT’s interview with shadow health secretary Andy Burnham? In which he outlines plans to “reset patient expectations” of the NHS, and relays the message from doctors that patients are just far too bloody demanding these days. (What has the Internet done to spread knowledge about health?)
You believe figures collected by Save the Children, Tim? Srsly?
About that bridge I was telling you about…
BiF has got there before me. If it’s from Save the Children, what’s the ‘agenda’? (Clue: it won’t be about saving children).
Whether we believe STC’s figures or not, the fact is that the WHO withdrew their advice about caesarians explicitly because of the NHS’s insane and dangerous reaction. The WHO made an observation about the number of C-sections being quite high in developed countries, and the NHS interpreted it as a target and set about reducing numbers no matter what, leading to the denial of C-sections to women who really needed them, resulting in complications and death. The WHO professed surprise at Britain’s bizarre reaction to a mere statistic.
They don’t call them Madwives for nothing, you know.
Midwives in the UK “tend to insist” on natural childbirth? Any evidence for that assertion? Speaking as a (relatively) recent father, that was not my experience at all.
I may be out-of-date but my experience leads me to sympathise with Churm Rincewind’s comment. When my boys were born the N Childbirth Trust was fighting a rearguard action against compulsory intervention in natural childbirth when that was the best option and advocating breast-feeding when that was the best option. No objection to Caesarians *when they were needed* just a dislike for *completely unnecessary* Caesarians that prejudiced the chances of survival of any subsequent baby.
The radicalism of NCT was in dragging embarrassed fathers along to the training sessions, not in dictating to midwives.
Natural childbirth might have something to do it as might the UK’s burgeoning immigrant population and the levels of obesity in the indigenous underclass.
“Women in the UK are more than twice as likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth as those in”
JUNK SCIENCE ALERT !!!
0.002% is twice 0.001%. If they had something, they’d tell us, not this “twice as likely” crap.
There is a lot of complexity to tease out of the figures. Maybe the UK has more mothers over 30, obese, diabetic than other countries. Maybe Poland has a very interventionist culture – eg pregnant Poles in the UK go back home to have scans every 10 days and then dash back to the UK to give birth, thereby skewing the data. Any figures for standard deviation, modes and medians?
> Midwives in the UK “tend to insist” on natural childbirth? Any evidence for that assertion?
Loads. Anecdotally, I’ve met so many women who’ve ended up with serious complications because of this (although I should say that bloody doulas are far worse than midwives). Evidentially, the WHO — who actually measure this stuff — explicitly criticised the NHS for exactly his reason, as I mentioned above.