It’s a convention as old as our species (I’m guessing) that if you have a hideous experience giving birth, you don’t tell younger women about it in case it puts them off. Around this lacuna where the normal exchange of information should be, a number of wrong assumptions cluster, unchallenged: that all births are terrible, and therefore equally terrible; that something which happens to so many people can’t possibly count as traumatic; and that people should shut up about it and move on.
So when the all-party parliamentary group’s birth trauma inquiry delivered its report this morning, that was always going to land as new news. The accounts submitted to the inquiry by 1,311 women were appalling: pain relief denied, medieval levels of hygiene, chronic understaffing, lifelong injuries to them and their babies, caused by mistakes and failures that were later denied by NHS trusts. It’s estimated that one woman in 20 comes out of childbirth with PTSD.
