Killing babies - the ultimate 'choice'

"Congratulations, dad! Your wife is dead, and your son is in the incinerator".
Patricia Hewitt might as well have strangled them with her own hands.

The mass murdering scum that run our health service are not content with rising death rates for mothers and babies. The true face of hell, Patricia Hewitt, has announced that every mother will be able to 'choose' a home delivery from 2009.

Women were 65 times more likely to die in childbirth in the US in 1900 as they are today. In 1900, women had a 0.5% chance of dying per birth. Today this figure is 0.008% per birth. Everyone's grandmother knew someone who had died in childbirth, and who had lost a baby in childbirth. Today, even doctors are unlikely to know of someone who has died in childbirth.

The reason for this is modern, hospital-based, consultant-led obstetric care. But now we are going back to the 'bad old days'. Maternal deaths are up 21% in the UK due to under-funding of front-line services.

But, the Netherlands do a lot of home deliveries and they seem to do it safely, I hear people saying.

To do safe home deliveries you need ALL of the following:

1. Lots of experienced midwives who have done lots of home deliveries. The Dutch have this. We don't. Ask your community midwife how many deliveries she has done in the last 5 years. Chances are she can count them on her fingers. Community midwives in the UK don't do many home deliveries. Many have not done a delivery for years. Period.
   
   
2. Lots of experienced GPs who are shit hot at obstetrics and can provide community back up, such as resuscitating a 'flat' baby and using forceps. We don't have any of these. Out of the hundreds of GPs that I know, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number who have done any home deliveries ever, who have done a delivery of any sort in the last 5-30 years. Very few have the skills to resuscitate a flat baby reliably, which means the flat babies will rapidly become dead babies.
   
   
3. Lots of experienced ambulance crews. In Holland, you need to be a registered nurse with at least 2 years experience before you can even START to train as a paramedic. That's 6 years+ training. They are used to home deliveries in Holland. In the UK paramedics are not nurses, and their training is much shorter and less in depth. Few UK paramedics have any experience in delivering babies, and training is very limited in both resuscitation of babies and deliveries. Ambulance response times are long in the UK due to shortages of 999 ambulances.
   
   
4. Hospitals with a consultant obstetrician and a consultant anaesthetist very close at hand. You need both of these people to do an emergency caesarian section. The UK population is much more spread out than the Dutch, we are closing maternity units, and we are centralising our anaesthetic services. So when there is a problem, it will be too late by the time the mother reaches the right hospital.

Dr Rant has done one emergency delivery in the community when the pregnancy ran into problems. Mum delivered before the ambulance arrived, but three minutes after Dr Rant did. Dr Rant is trained and experienced in paediatric resuscitation, but the baby still died the next day in hospital.

It will take many years, if not decades, of heavy investment in training and service delivery to safely change the UK over to a home delivery culture. It will mean more training for a small group of midwives, and a gradual roll out of the system as experience increases amongst staff. It will mean many more ambulances, longer paramedic training, more money to train and pay GPs, and keeping local consultant maternity services open.

But Patricia is planning to do all this in just two years. And she plans to do it with the same (or, knowing her, less) money. She can do it fast and cheap because her plan is just to let lots of babies die. She, and her ilk, are evil fucks. Imagine them strangling your children at birth and you have some idea of their place in society.