22/09/2025
📢 Fear in Maternity Care: Why It Matters to discuss
🚨 Modern NHS maternity care often leans on a “better safe than sorry” model. While safety is essential, fear-based messaging can sometimes increase intervention rates without always improving outcomes.
❌Every day I witness reports of coercion and it’s NOT ok, I would like to ask BARONESS AMOS what will she do to tackle this behavior that occurs daily across the country?
⚠️ The Issues
🌍Global C-section rates have risen dramatically — in some countries exceeding 50% of all births.
🌍The World Health Organization (WHO) states that C-sections above 10–15% are not linked to reductions in maternal or newborn deaths.
⏰Many interventions (inductions, continuous monitoring, epidurals, instrumental deliveries) are lifesaving when medically necessary — but overuse can lead to complications, longer recovery, and emotional trauma.
🧠 How Fear Plays a Role
🗣️Language that emphasizes risk (“your baby could die if…”) can pressure families into decisions.
😰Fear of litigation, time pressure, or institutional culture may drive unnecessary interventions.
😶🌫️Parents may feel disempowered, as though birth is something to be “managed” rather than a physiological process.
🌱 What Families Deserve/sadly not often happens
🙏Balanced, good evidence-based information about both risks and benefits of interventions.
🫶🏼Respect for physiological birth when mother and baby are well.
🫷🏽Informed choice and shared decision-making, not decisions made out of fear.
What are your experiences? Did you feel involved in decision making, listened to and plenty of time to make choices? Or the opposite? Tell me ⬇️⬇️⬇️
Abigail 🫶🏼
