RACHEL JOHNSON: Too posh to push? Try the pain of a £1,000 ‘baby tax for an elected caesarean instead
Newsflash! There is nothing natural about childbirth. Or at least in my experience anyway. I’ve done it three times in NHS hospitals, and each time it’s been a brutal barnyard trip to Herriot country.
Men stick their arms inside you up to the elbow as you bellow like a cow, you are impaled on forceps as large as oars, cut open… it’s floor-to-ceiling gore.
Robbie Williams summed up the experience of witnessing his wife Ayda give birth to their first child as ‘like watching my favourite pub burn down’. Yup. That sounds about right.
Newsflash! There is nothing natural about childbirth. Or at least in my experience anyway. I’ve done it three times in NHS hospitals, and each time it’s been a brutal barnyard trip to Herriot country
My first child was born after a 36-hour labour that ended in theatre (forceps). My second was a 12-hour labour followed by an emergency caesarean because the baby was in a rare presentation called ‘face/brow’. Only my third was a two-hour quickie without analgesia (I knew the epidural I was screaming for was off the table when the midwife said ‘The anaesthetist is on his way’… then winked).
Frankly, I would have put a bullet in my head if someone had passed me a gun each time, but in those days doctor knew best. If you were lucky, you had a lovely baby at the end of it. That seemed a reasonable deal when I was giving birth towards the end of the last century.
It is why I was shocked to my core to see headlines last week about three-quarters of hospitals denying women the right to caesareans. No, not shocked by the bad behaviour of the NHS trusts in refusing the ops. Shocked by the fact that women are entitled to demand elective C-sections in the absence of medical reasons in the first place.
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It’s time I had a Shirley Valentine facelift, says INGRID…
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Why would anyone want junior delivered through the sunroof – sounds larky but a C-section is major abdominal surgery – if the regular exit is in service?
I’m not pretending that two of my births weren’t blue-light-flashing bloodbaths, but after a C-section you can’t walk, drive, even sit up at the beginning (I remember a midwife shouting, ‘Feed baby! Feed baby!’ but I was hooked to a morphine pump and in too much pain to hold her).
Presumably, the reason the C-section has had to become available on demand is because so many women are terrified of giving birth: they’re frightened of the wear and tear to their bodies, the One Born Every Minute splatter movie that is childbirth, and above all, the loss of control (as mothers will know, the words ‘birth plan’ are a laughable oxymoron).
Why would anyone want junior delivered through the sunroof – sounds larky but a C-section is major abdominal surgery – if the regular exit is in service?
If you go into labour naturally (sic), it’s pot luck: babies are often born in the middle of the night, the NHS is short-staffed, a smooth Rolls-Royce experience is not always on the cards. With a planned elective C-section, you know that you will be guaranteed medical attention and pain relief, and at a specified time.
Here’s my solution. If a woman wants, rather than needs, a caesarean, she should, I suppose, have it. But if she doesn’t have it privately, she should pay the difference – a C-section costs at least £1,000 more than a normal delivery – to the maternity services of the NHS, to improve the experience for everyone: mums, midwives, babies, fathers too.
Be too posh to push by all means – but on your dime, not mine.
It’s not success that’s put men off, Shirley
Strictly judge Shirley Ballas says men ‘don’t adhere’ to successful women
Strictly judge Shirley Ballas says men ‘don’t adhere’ to successful women.
Interesting concept, if true.
Ms Ballas, also says she never goes out to dinner in case she puts on weight, she fasts, she hasn’t got any friends or social life, and has issues around ‘trust’.
Meanwhile, her ex has banged on about multiple affairs on both sides.
So I have to ask, more in sorrow: is it really Shirley’s success that’s putting the chaps off – or everything else?
Coverage of Kay Longstaff, the blonde Brit who apparently jumped overboard while on a cruise in the Adriatic, has been immersive. She survived after ten hours bobbing and singing.
Her ‘triumph over tragedy’ tale made me wonder how many non-English people not on booze cruises weren’t so lucky.
The answer is more than 1,000 souls have drowned trying to cross the Med in the year to date, 200 of them on one July weekend alone. Thought they deserved at least a mention.
The last word in party poopers
A dog called Oscar has made the papers because his mistress splurged five grand on a party for him.
Animal parties are a total waste of time and money – as I know to my cost. As smitten new parents of a crossbreed, the children and I hosted a puppy party for Coco’s first birthday.
Invitations were sent out to a dozen of Coco’s closest canine friends. Party games such as Paws the Pawcel were prepared.
A table was laid with ‘tasty treats’.
Seconds after kick-off, all the dogs started barking and chasing and biting each other.
This attracted the attention of the neighbour’s black lab, Ernie – not invited, I might add – who raced over and insisted on trying to ‘marry’ Coco in front of the horrified small children.
All the dogs then scattered to the four winds. It was a fiasco. And yes, there were several ‘party poopers’ too.
Lucky old Oxfam. The scandal-hit charity has landed a massive windfall after a plane crash killed British businessman Richard Cousins and his family (his will contained a common tragedy clause, instructing everything to go to Oxfam if all his intended beneficiaries died along with him).
If only Cousins’s will could contain a proviso additional to what lawyers tenderly call the ‘wipe-out clause’. This one would force charity execs to spend all the dosh on the ground, and not on the organisation’s high-ups.
The latest accounts show the number of Oxfam employees earning six-figure salaries has doubled in seven years.
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