Stories of medical woe abound, as if the NHS is a religion that is fracturing: murderous Lucy Letby, who dressed the babies she killed, and who secured an apology from the doctors who suspected her of murder; the agony of Nottingham, which is filled with missing children now; Martha Mills, the 13-year-old girl with sepsis who died because the presiding doctors refused to admit her to paediatric ICU.
I have a story of common trauma and good fortune because my child lived and so, in a fog of sadness, did I. But that I even frame it as good luck is interesting because I wasn’t lucky, unless you think motherhood is a zero-sum game: some win it, and some lose. I believe that my experience of childbirth denied me another child, and indelibly damaged me. That is the condition of motherhood, though it shouldn’t be. Everything must be caveated, and everything must be paid for.
I am no expert on healthcare. I am not qualified to write about how the NHS is run – people are harmed everywhere in the world – though I have not worshipped it since I saw an ancient woman, wailing and ignored, under a strip light in my late mother-in-law’s ward. Why should medical professionals be worse, or better, than anyone else?
But I am able to write about my own experience. I was completely unprepared for childbirth. The act of motherhood is filled – no, shrouded – with spin: the grateful woman, made whole by her state. The woman is coerced first to do it, and then to enjoy it, at least in my generation. I hope that this is changing.
I was 40, and morbidly obese: that’s the first caveat. Women shouldn’t have a first child at this age, but what choice is there if we are to have agency beyond motherhood? (I summon the witnesses of impossible housing, low pay, and the most expensive childcare in Western Europe. There are probably others.) I bounced into the hospital, believing the spin, at least by then. In the early days of my pregnancy, I had thought about death in childbirth. I requested – and was granted – an elective caesarean section but was talked out of it by a charismatic consultant who told me she had held dying girls, victims of female genital mutilation, in her arms. How could I ask for an elective caesarean – which she said I didn’t need – after that? Pain would be my privilege.
I am a recovering drug addict: that’s the second caveat. I shouldn’t have taken the morphine they offered me, but I did. That’s what drug addicts do. Labour shocked me. A decade on, I am still shocked. I hadn’t wanted my husband, who was more frightened even than I, as what we call a “birth partner” but that’s what people do. You share something that can’t be shared, to be companionable. It’s the least you can do with your good fortune. Unmentionable things fell out of me. Hollow-eyed, he caught them.
I was told I should have a caesarean section after all: an emergency. The child came, merry and handsome. I thought him perfect. But I wasn’t: any dregs of perfection I had were now his. The morphine ebbed, and I had a psychotic episode: the third caveat. I fantasised about throwing myself out of a window, or under a train. They banged my bowel during the caesarean section. The next day, blood falling from me, I began to vomit excrement. It’s called paralytic ileus, and it’s an absorbing condition: a metaphor perhaps. They didn’t believe me and gave me Gaviscon for indigestion. Eventually I walked to the desk with my bowl of consuming vomit. They believed that.
A week later I walked out of hospital with a child and an incalculable sense of shame. I had failed at motherhood: at selflessness. I feel it still. By the time I could bear the idea of another birth it was too late, and that’s my lucky tale.
I spent a long time blaming the Virgin Mary, our original cover-girl: a bloodless woman, so not a woman at all. But she is only a symptom, surely, of the passive-aggressive sanctification of motherhood that birth, so rudely, interrupts. I developed an implacable hatred of commercial surrogacy: surely only a monster would ask someone to have a child on their behalf? For a long time, I would cross the road to avoid speaking to a mother pregnant with her first child. What if she asked me what it is like? You can argue that this silence is protective, but for whom?
It’s curious that, when a woman is most a person – a mother is only a woman who has split into two – she is most commonly, and dangerously, dehumanised. There is a thread through all these stories: an unwillingness to listen. That is where we must start.
