#66 FiLiA Meets: Greater Manchester Doulas - Birth during COVID-19
In the UK, as the coronavirus pandemic rages, we are seeing the effects of years of over-medicalisation of birth. The NHS has decided that the best use of its midwives would be to close all midwifery-led units, strip back their home birth services and redeploy all midwives to the obstetric units. This is a huge blow, but it is just the start. This move made it so that healthy women had to scrap their plans for a low/no-intervention natural birth and head to an obstetric unit, where the rates of intervention and caesarean are so much higher. Imagine the anxiety of that woman, being told to go to the hospital that everyone else in the country is being told to stay away from if they are not sick. Pregnancy is not a sickness and more often than not, doesn't need to be a medical event.
LINKS:
Greater Manchester Doulas Website