Relentlessly pushing the idea of ‘natural’ childbirth is an affront to pregnant women

‘There’s not much you can teach or sell a person who’d prefer to give birth in a nicely lit operating theatre.’ Photograph: JGI/Jamie Grill/Getty Images/Tetra images RF

For Grantly Dick-Read, the Victorian originator of the UK’s natural childbirth movement, birthing women in Britain should emulate those, as he phrased it, “of more primitive types”. In Natural Childbirth, 1933, he pictured one of these individuals disappearing into a “thicket” – it sounded plausible enough from Woking – to await her pain-free labour.

“Natural birth is all that she looks for; there are no fears in her mind; no midwives spoiling the natural process; she has no knowledge of the tragedies of sepsis, infection and haemorrhage.”