I shouldn't need to protect women and birth from delusional midwives and the system they uphold but

I’ve been radicalised. I took a misguided and shameful wrong turn into established midwifery. What I saw there radicalised me and now I’m back on track.

Spending more than 2 years training as a midwife in the NHS in England and then experiencing these services as a pregnant woman is what finally radicalised me. As did the following Instagram pages that you should all follow:

@kemibirthjoyjohnson

@birthwise.withleonie

@livewildbirthfree

@freetobirth

@samanthagadsdendoula

@bauhauswife

The response of midwives and student midwives to the information given by these women in these pages show exactly the problem with contemporary maternity care.

More important than the understaffing, the morally injurious conditions for staff, the ridiculously long hours, the poor pay, the deskilling of midwives (breech birth has now largely been passed into an obstetrician’s remit) is the attitude of midwives.

They are inculcated at the universities to believe that birth is dangerous and fault-ridden if left alone. They are given the power to report women to government agencies if their birth choices are not to their taste (essentially accept every and all appointments, in which you’re groomed to pathologise your pregnancy/birth and coerced into unnecessary induction of labour) They are agents of the state, bolstered by their educational institutions, to believe that they “deliver” babies… and it’s gone to their heads.

It takes a strong, wilful student not to be hoodwinked into believing this when they are trained in hospitals, rarely seeing natural, undisturbed birth.

Some, erroneously believe that by training as a midwife they can transform services from within…but this is a fallacy. Those who convince themselves that having spent thousands of pounds (about £66,000), 3 years education and 1 year preceptorship, training to work in an established system, they will pay their registration fee, agree to practice according to the Nursing and Midwifery Council Code and THEN conversely begin challenging the system from within, perform the most agile of mental gymnastics. It’s cognitive dissonance in the extreme. I know because I experienced it and realised the more entrenched in the NHS I became the less useful I became at affecting change.

Established health services in England are a for-profit industry. The dismantling and privatisation of the NHS is near complete so don’t be fooled by the fact that you don’t pay at point of service for maternity services. Don’t believe the lie that they have yours and your baby’s best interest at heart. They practice defensively (doing too much too soon) to avoid litigation.

The profits are made from the paraphernalia of the industrial medical complex: the CTG machines, the dopplers, the scans, the lube, the gloves, the masks, the gowns, the beds, the drugs, the £9,500 a year tuition fees… and none of it helps birth, none of it helps women.

Birth, when left alone, works. Your body and your baby knows instinctively what to do to facilitate birth. Apart from educating oneself about the physiology, mechanics and hormones of birth, deconditioning oneself from the prevalent narrative of birth as dangerous and gruesome and finding a trusted expert in natural birth (these are rarely midwives due to the aforementioned problems in midwifery training) to attend you, women rarely need any help to give birth to their babies.