A 12-year campaign in the UK by the Royal College of Midwives encouraging women to have ‘normal births’ has been dropped.
Midwives had previously been encouraging women to give birth without medical intervention, a campaign which has now been described as making women feel like “failures”.
The guidance for medical professionals has been overhauled, and procedures such as caesareans and epidurals will no longer be labelled as “abnormal”.
Prof Cathy Warwick, chief executive of the college, admitted the previous campaign had “created the wrong idea”.
“There was a danger that if you just talk about normal births, and particularly if you call it a campaign, it kind of sounds as if you’re only interested in women who have a vaginal birth without intervention,” she told The Times.
“What we don’t want to do is in any way contribute to any sense that a woman has failed because she hasn’t had a normal birth. Unfortunately, that seems to be how some women feel,” she continued.
The campaign had revealed that currently 40 per cent of women in the UK give birth naturally (i.e. without medical intervention), 30 years ago it was around 60 per cent of women.
In New Zealand, according to a 2014 report, one in every three women giving birth had a spontaneous vaginal birth without having an induced or augmented labour, an epidural or an episiotomy.
