I was absolutely gobsmacked to hear of the latest horror to emerge from Britain’s woeful National Health Service. It’s been bad enough to have to have experienced or witnessed piss poor NHS treatment or have spoken to people who are consistently being treated like dirt by an NHS that they’ve paid for and which should instead be treating them properly. But it’s beyond bad to find out that at least 1,400 babies and mothers have variously been killed or physically or psychologically injured in a maternity hospital merely because NHS midwifery had decided to follow a fad and a fashion that said that the vast majority of births should be vaginal and that Caesarian births should be minimised. NHS midwifery by putting medical needs behind a fashion for promoting vaginal births caused deaths and misery at Telford and Shrewsbury NHS Trust.

Sky News said:

A major report will today reveal the true scale of failings at a hospital trust where hundreds of babies died or were left brain damaged.

The Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust has been under investigation for failings in maternity care.

A culture at the Trust that favoured natural births as well as repeated failure to monitor babies properly or learn from mistakes are all expected to be blamed for what is already recognised to be the worst maternity scandal in the history of the NHS.

Well the report by the independent midwife Donna Ockenden has been released and it makes for grim reading as many of us who have been following this case expected. The report states that the cultural fetish that the Trust had for vaginal births and the policy of denying women caesarians even when the women were begging for one, has caused the deaths of ‘at least’ 201 babies and nine mothers. In addition to these deaths there were 94 babies who continue to suffer catastrophic mental and physical impairment because the hospital’s policy of denying caesarians to women which resulted in the babies being starved of oxygen. These babies would most likely survived and thrived were it not for the NHS pressing for vaginal births and not intervening with a caesarian in a timely enough manner.

Another report on Sky News said:

The major report into more than two decades of avoidable harm to babies and mothers at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust has found mothers were blamed for the deaths of their babies. Some families were told mothers were responsible for their own deaths.

As we can clearly see, this fetish for vaginal births even when it went against medical advice or common sense was not a short term problem for this particular NHS Trust. This obscene screw up went on for more than twenty years. During this period not only did the NHS continue with a practise that must surely have been an obvious matter of concern for medics, but the NHS then tried to cover up their gross and unforgivable errors by blaming the, sometimes now dead, mothers whom the NHS had failed.

What a disgraceful episode that all this is for the NHS. The NHS and its staff caused a catalogue of deaths and disablement that could have been avoided. But the NHS and its management decided, as they did with Lobotomy and do today with the gender ideology, to follow a medical fad. In the case of Shrewsbury and Telford the fad in question was an ideological belief that a large number of vaginal births must be encouraged at all costs. Babies and mothers died and nearly a hundred more children suffered catastrophic injury because every relevant person in the medical chain which was supposedly caring for the mothers to be, cleaved to the ideology that surgical intervention was to be resisted. Where this fad came from and whether it arose from a desire to control medical costs or some hippie shit idea that birth is wonderful and carefree when done ‘naturally’, is mostly irrelevant at this stage. What is important is that an NHS Trust along with a vast number of people who should have known better, who worked in the NHS, went along with a medical fad despite what must have been an increasing amount of evidence that the faddish policies were a disaster. A culture of silence by the NHS along with a culture of treating the patients as if they were dirt is what this report has uncovered. Relatives of those whom this Trust’s piss poor treatment killed or maimed were ignored and dismissed by arrogant and uncaring NHS staff and every effort seems to have been made by NHS staff involved in this travesty of a maternity system to hide the outcomes of their cretinous mismanagement along with trying to blame others for the NHS’s errors.

This is said to be the worst maternity scandal in NHS history. Maybe it is? Or is it maybe only the worst scandal until the next time the NHS decides that some ideological faeces of a similar nature to this ‘vaginal birth always’ policy drops from the diseased arsehole of our debased academia and becomes NHS policy or a new or speculative idea becomes a clinical ‘must do’ instruction. In the case of this Shrewsbury and Telford NHS horror, genuine concern in some parts of the Western medical world that some caesarians might not be strictly medically necessary, was taken by the NHS and turned into a ‘vaginal birth always’ cult. We can see from this case how the NHS and its staff are extremely vulnerable to and receptive of group think. The group think said that vaginal birth should be encouraged and the staff worked to that standard and not what would have been best for both mother and baby.

Babies and mothers died and babies were maimed because of this hospital’s policy of encouraging vaginal births even when such births were medically unwise. These avoidable deaths and disablements occurred over a twenty year period spanning the periods in office of five Prime Ministers and under the national governance of three different political parties, Tories, Labour and the Lib Dem/Tory Coalition. That’s an incredibly long time for such a monstrous scandal as occurred at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust to continue. What we have here is an example of how the NHS has screwed up, lied to hide their screw ups and also blamed those who are blameless for the failures of the NHS.

This is the disgrace of a health service that your Government ordered you to clap for and celebrate in 2020 and 2021. There’s nothing to celebrate about the NHS in my view. It’s a failed system and as we saw not just in this Shrewsbury and Telford scandal but in many of the other NHS scandals, also a lethal one.

We deserve better than what we get from the NHS. In fact we deserve better than the NHS. This state within a state, this monstrous behemoth of bureaucracy, incompetence and waste is nothing like the effective, efficient, responsive and safe healthcare system that Britons deserve.

I’d like to end this piece with a message. It’s a message for all those who in the last two years or so painted rainbows on their front windows or banged pots and pans or clapped outside their homes in order to praise the NHS. This message is: After looking at the pictures of the dying or dead babies in the news reports about this story and after reading about the lost mothers and grieving parents, do you feel properly ashamed that you clapped for this monstrous failure of a healthcare system? If you don’t then maybe you should.