So it would seem that the NHS is getting prepared to offer women the choice of having a caesarean even if there is no medical reason for having one. The figures would suggest this costs on average an extra £800 more than a natural birth but I don't imagine this takes into account the actual additional time that the woman would have to spend in hospital
I'd imagine many women would opt for this if they didn't want to experience any pain , discomfort or inconvenience of having a child when there were no other concerns.
One journalist has typically got her dunagrees twisted and says ...
Indulge me in a thought experiment. Imagine an experience that affects only men and involves hours of mind-altering pain, blood, gore and brutality. It leaves some of them so shaken that they slip into debilitating depression; it leaves others sitting uncomfortably, prone to haemorrhoids or incontinence – and even allergic to sex.
Now picture a procedure that does away with all that pain and horror, but comes at an extra £800 cost to the NHS. Do you think that men would pause for a nanosecond before pushing and shoving the Government into making that procedure available to all, on demand, with no ifs or buts? Sit-ins, protest marches, and the threat of strikes would bring the medical authorities to their knees, and the NHS's experts to their senses. Citing everything from their fragile mental health to their vital contribution to the economy, men would get their way.
But childbirth is a woman's matter. The government of the day has to launch consultations, specialists have to conduct studies, and the sands of time must trickle down painfully s-l-o-w-l-y before anyone sees fit to release females from the greatest suffering that most of them will ever endure. NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) has finally proposed that caesarean births should be available to any woman who wants one on the NHS – but it's taken them more than 60 years to get around to it.
I don't just blame the NICE men. Natural birth fanatics, midwives, and NHS bean counters have long opposed caesarean sections, deriding those who want it as wimps and scroungers.
Step into an NHS surgery when pregnant and you'll come face to face with placenta-munching Gaia-worshipping thugs determined to make you have a baby "Nature's way". They wax lyrical about contractions that "ebb and flow like the sea" and birthing pools that simulate the womb. I still wince at the memory of being an "elderly primigravida", the flattering term for an expectant mother over 40.
I signed up for the council's prenatal classes and obediently joined a dozen or so women in breathing exercises. We sounded like bellows and looked like Humpty Dumpty, but the worst was still to come. Our instructor (a midwife) shared her mantra: home births were for heroines, gas and air for wimps, and as for caesareans – God forbid – they were for those "too posh to push", of course. Childbirth, she explained, was a sacred ritual, and we were to re-enact the ancient rites of our ancestresses. I was reduced to a quivering wreck: my pregnancy was no longer a wondrous adventure to relish, but a Calvary to dread. I felt as bereft of medical help as if I'd been a cavewoman, squatting in the mud to push out my baby. Thankfully, when I did have my emergency caesarean, it was mercifully quick and painless. So she would know about having a natural birth then
