Three hundred babies lost to a fixation on natural births

When Debbie Greenaway was told by doctors that she should try to deliver her twin babies naturally, she was nervous. 

But the doctor was adamant, she recalls. “He said: ‘We’ve got the lowest caesarean rates in the country and we are proud of it and we plan to keep it that way'."

For Greenaway, labour was seemingly endless. She was given repeated doses of syntocinon, a drug used to bring on contractions. By the second day, the midwife was worried for one of the babies, whom the couple had named John. “She was getting really concerned that they couldn’t find John’s heartbeat.”

Her husband remembers “the midwife shaking her head”. “She said a number of times that we should be having a caesarean.”

By the time doctors finally decided to perform an emergency C-section, it was too late. Starved of oxygen, baby John had suffered a catastrophic brain injury. When he was delivered at 3am, he had no pulse. Efforts to resuscitate him failed.

Their son’s death was part of what is now recognised as the largest maternity scandal in NHS history. 

The five-year investigation will reveal that the experiences of 1,500 families at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust between 2000 and 2019 were examined. At least 12 mothers died while giving birth, and some families lost more than one child in separate incidents, the report is expected to show.

The expert midwife Donna Ockenden and a team of more than 90 midwives and doctors will deliver a damning verdict on the Shrewsbury trust, its culture and leadership — and failure to learn from mistakes or listen to families.

At its heart is how a toxic obsession with “normal birth” — fuelled by targets and pressure from the NHS to reduce caesarean rates — became so pervasive that life-or-death decisions on the maternity ward became dangerously distorted for nearly two decades.

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Source:  The Times, 26 March 2022