Trigger warning: please note that Becky’s story below includes mentions of pressure, coercion and social services involvement.
Becky
Becky had a terrible experience with her second pregnancy for a number of reasons. A key issue was that the hospital had noted her due date as two weeks ahead of Becky’s own calculations, which led to a sustained campaign of pressure and coercion to deliver much earlier than Becky had wanted to. Here Becky shares her experience in her own words:
“My partner and I used Natural Cycles and we had the dates all planned but when we got to 38 weeks, they started to question the size of the baby. I agreed to go in for the scans to keep checking blood flow, but in hindsight I do wish I hadn’t gone to the sizing scans, as it felt like they were just collecting more and more data to use against me.”
“As we got closer to my due date, I was assigned a consultant midwife, who was helpful, but who ultimately supported the doctors who were trying to force me into interventions. They started talking about significant fluid reduction at the scan and told me “You need to decide RIGHT NOW if you are going to have an induction or a caesarean”.”
“I wasn’t going to be rushed into a decision, so I went home.”
“I told them I wasn’t going to do either of those things, although I did say I was happy to go in and check the baby’s heartbeat. Every time he was fine. But the amount the hospital was stressing us was making me start to panic. They would even make scan appointment for the previous day, and then they would text me the following day saying I’d missed the appointment.”
“The hospital called me telling me I needed to seek legal advice. According to their dates, I was 42 weeks. I had an appointment with another consultant who gave us the total coercion spiel, telling us the placenta was failing, that we were going to have a dead baby. At one point she even started laughing at us because we were firing back with facts and figures.”
“At 42 weeks, social services knocked on our door. They were harassing us basically, there were 15 days between my dates and the dates they were suggesting.”
“At one particular visit around 43 weeks (according to the NHS dates) the Head of Midwifery decided to escort us from a scan to the ward, she stood over me with a clipboard and questioned me on the ’governance of it’ all while I was linked to an ECG monitor supposedly gathering mine and baby’s heart rate. She then arranged an ambush from the initial consultant (one we had specifically asked not to see again).
“On multiple occasions the obstetric team misrepresented data from the scan to support their coercion.”
They continually ignored me and instead focused on ‘data sets’ which are outdated and flawed because they didn’t go beyond 40 weeks gestation.
When my son was finally born, he was just 6 pounds 8. We looked at the placenta and there was no more deterioration than you would expect.”
Read our report ‘End Coercion in Maternity Care in the UK’You can access our FREE human rights information factsheet on ‘Social Services and Maternity Care’ here, and find further resources around coercion via the button above.