Well, when you speak to the majority of women about the experiences they have in hospital to do with their birth, there are some quite strong themes that emerge. And information is one of them. But I think that is changing because of the amount of information that’s available online. And most women get the vast majority of their information from talking to other women. And it does sometimes feel when you’re pregnant that other women are just dying to tell you all about what happened to them. And I’ve got a theory about that, and it’s because having a baby, giving birth, is an immensely traumatic event. A few women have a very, very beautiful experience, where flowers burst into bloom and the sun comes out and it’s all lovely. But I’ve never met one of them. Most women have a birthing experience which is unpleasant on some level or other. And I think that women like to relive those experiences as part of their own self-therapy, because talking it through with other people is a good way of getting over the trauma of having given birth. And that’s why any chance you give to a woman to tell you about her birthing experiences and she’ll tell you in lurid detail.

There’s other strong themes about nursing care on the wards. It’s very rare to find women who say, “Yeah, I had a really lovely time and the nurses were all beautiful.” It’s always the other way round, where people say, “God, you know, I had to go and do this for myself. I had to do that. It was very traumatic.” And noise levels, women often say, you’ve just given birth, it’s one of the most private, intense moments of your life, and you’re there in a dormitory, you know, like a public dormitory in the cheapest, tattiest hotel you could ever imagine, with four complete strangers. And you do kind of think, “We’re in the second, third millennium now. Is this really the way that women have to bring new life into the world?”

 

I think there’s a place for randomised controlled trials, but I think the way that the birthing experience needs to be investigated, it should be more experiential, because that’s the way that women experience it, that’s the way they talk about it. They discuss it endlessly as part of their own therapy. It’s how you get over the experience. You talk about it, you tell other mums about it, you find people who’ve had worse experiences than you, better experiences. And, you know, finding out that in fact someone else has had a really horrible and similar experience to you at that exact same hospital on that exact same ward makes you feel vindicated. You then start to think, “It’s not me. I wasn’t just a cronky, grumpy patient. Actually there’s a problem there on that ward.” That’s what these people need to hear.

 

But often they’re not that interested in that because I suppose there’s nothing they can do about it. If they can’t get the staff for a particular ward, they can’t get the staff.