Risking a baby’s health for the sake of having a natural birth is irresponsible

The unfortunate episode with the apple in the Garden of Eden had two disagreeable consequences. The curse of Adam was he would have to work with the sweat of his brow, something we lost no time undermining. The curse of Eve was just as dismal: “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”.

Well, that was a challenge that modern obstetrics has pretty well sorted. The inherent problem of childbirth, which Nancy Mitford compared with trying to squeeze an orange through your nostril, has been solved through a combination of caesareans, epidurals and the monitoring of foetal wellbeing during childbirth.

Yet you can never please some people. The most striking development in this area during the past half century has been the movement for natural childbirth. Birthing pools, hypnosis, doulas and the embrace by some feminists of the active childbirth movement has meant lots of women have gone for home births, water births and non-medicalised births in preference to the hospitalised, doctor-led sort.

And many have loved it. I know women who had a life-enhancing time giving birth at home in a paddling pool; I also know a couple of doulas, professional friends of women in labour. But the rise in non-medicalised birth has had a predictable downside. There were 232 claims for brain-damaged babies last year, up from 188 cases the year before. The NHS faces claims of some £2 billion for the costs of caring for the unfortunate victims. Some, we don’t know how many, are attributable to a fixation with “normal” births, a term the Royal College of Midwives dropped last week, noiselessly.

Certainly, a study by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists suggested three-quarters of 1,136 births which ended in neonatal death, injury or stillbirth in 2015 could have been avoided with the right care. Not all of them are attributable to the natural birth cult but some will be.

I’ve been here myself, when my chidren were born 10 and 13 years ago. I too signed up with a Notting Hill pregnancy yoga guru, who doubled as a doula and took pride in shouting medics out of the labour room. I too went for the NCT course in going the natural route, though when they asked for suggestions of how to keep energy levels up during labour, my first suggestion was chocolate, the second, champagne. The correct answer was “bananas”.

But all that apparatus of natural birth — the hypnosis tapes, the TENS machines — bit the dust when my nice consultant in Dublin told me that since the foetus was sitting upright it would be safer to have a caesarean. And, because he was an expert and I wasn’t, I said yes. And thank God, all was well. No question about labour pains, because there was a competent anaesthetist. Morphine galore. No trauma whatever. Second time around same again: he said after one caesarean, another would be safer. As ever, blindly obedient to authority, I agreed. So another medicalised birth: safe and supervised by a consultant.

There are any number of downsides to modernity but one obviously redemptive aspect of living in the 21st century is that women here hardly ever die in childbirth and babies are rarely born brain-damaged. And yet there are people in flight from medicalised obstetrics, who repudiate the advances that women up to a couple of generations ago would have begged for.

A male lawyer friend who specialises in injuries compensation took the firmest line on this. He had no time for non-hospital births, he told me firmly. He’d handled compensation claims for botched births and was certain it wasn’t worth the risk. He was right.

By all means go for a natural birth if a professional says you can. But it’s nuts to repudiate the blessings of epidurals, caesareans and bleeping monitors because it’s natural. So is dying in childbirth.

Booze holds the answer to the Irish border

The Government has promised that, post Brexit, there will be no “return to the hard borders of the past”. Which is fine, dandy and all to the good.

The only question is, how we do it. Through technology, the way trade is managed on the US-Canada border? By giving Northern Ireland some sort of special intermediate status between the EU and the UK? The Irish PM, Leo Varadker, has been conspicuously unhelpful in proposing ways around the problem. As for Sinn Fein, its tough-nut vice-president and would-be PM, Mary Lou McDonald (right), has joyfully seized on the problem as proof that the border is essentially a “false construct”.

For me it boils down to what we might call the Jameson’s question — or Bushmills if you prefer. If the UK is outside the EU customs regime, well, that means no duty on whiskey, no? But if Jameson’s is, say, a fiver cheaper in the north than the republic, I can tell you what that means: a Gadarene rush of thirsty purchasers from the republic cleaning up stocks in the north and taking them south.

If we can sort out this question, the rest, frankly, will be easy.