If I Was a Farmer and 50% of My Animals Needed Surgery… You’d Ask WTF Was Going On.

A not-so subtle reminder that we're animals, baby...

Imagine you’re a farmer. You’re running a healthy, well-managed farm, where your animals have been breeding and birthing for generations.

Then suddenly, 50% of your livestock require surgical intervention just to give birth.

You’d be alarmed, right? You’d question whether something had changed in their environment, whether their health was being mismanaged, or if there was something deeply wrong with the system you were operating within.

Yet, in human childbirth, this level of intervention is becoming the norm - and nowhere near enough people are asking WTF is going on.

The System Is Not Built for Birth - It’s Built to Manage Risk

The latest NHS data shows that the rate of labour induction in the UK has risen from 23% in 2012-13 to 33% in 2022-23. That’s a 10% rise in a decade, meaning that one in three labours is now medically initiated. Locally to me, we’re looking an an average induction rate of 45%+ each month, and that’s not including any membrane sweeps.

And that’s just induction. Let’s talk about c-section rates.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that caesarean rates should ideally be between 10-15% for optimal maternal and neonatal health. But in the UK, we’ve soared past that. C-section rates have now hit 37.3% - the highest they’ve ever been. In many areas, it’s over 50%.

That means that in certain hospitals, half of all births now end in theatre.

If we were seeing this in nature, we’d be desperately searching for an explanation.

But in maternity care? This is quietly accepted as “the way things are.”

Is More Intervention Leading to Better Outcomes?

We might assume that higher intervention rates = better safety, right? If we're inducing more labours and performing more caesareans, surely that means we're saving more lives?

Unfortunately, the data doesn’t support that idea.

The latest MBRRACE-UK report (which tracks maternal deaths in the UK) shows that maternal mortality is at its highest in almost 20 years. The rate has jumped 53% in the last three years alone, from 8.79 per 100,000 in 2017-19 to 13.41 per 100,000 in 2020-22.

At the same time, postnatal mental health issues have skyrocketed. Around 4-5% of women now develop PTSD after birth, equating to 25,000–30,000 women per year in the UK.

So what does that tell us?

It tells us that more interventions aren’t necessarily saving more lives - but they are increasing trauma.

Why Is This Happening?

Birth has become something to "manage" rather than something to support.

The system is intolerant of risk, yet it fails to acknowledge the risks of medical intervention itself. The perception that more monitoring, more induction, more surgery = safer outcomes has gone unchecked, despite growing evidence that routine intervention can be harmful when not medically necessary.

We have stopped trusting the process of birth.

We have stopped trusting women’s bodies.

We have stopped seeing birth as an event that belongs to the mother and baby dyad - and started treating it as a problem to be solved.

But at what cost?

The Loss of the Mother-Baby Dyad

For thousands of years, birth was understood as a deeply physiological, emotional, and psychological event - one that belonged not just to the birthing person but to the baby, too. The mother-baby dyad is a sacred relationship that begins in pregnancy and is solidified in birth and the postpartum period.

But in a system hyper-focused on "managing risk", the mother-baby relationship is an afterthought.

Inductions mean a mother is often left exhausted before labour has even begun.

Medicalised settings can interfere with oxytocin and physiological birth.

Emergency c-sections can create a stark, disorienting start to life for the baby.

Separation after birth, NICU admissions, and lack of skin-to-skin impact early bonding.

We know that birth trauma affects bonding and breastfeeding. We know that postnatal depression and PTSD increase when a woman experiences a birth that felt out of her control.

And yet, instead of reassessing the system, we are still acting as if more control = better birth.

The Challenge: It’s Not Your Job to Fix the System

Here’s the hard part: this isn’t your responsibility to fix.

If you’re pregnant right now, you shouldn’t have to be the one figuring out how to work around a system that doesn’t work for you.

You shouldn’t have to fight for informed consent, navigate coercion, or push back against policies that don’t prioritise physiological birth.

But understanding the system’s flaws is the first step in navigating it.

This is why informed choice is so critical. When you know that the system isn’t perfectly designed and has biases, you can approach decisions with a critical lens. You can ask better questions. You can advocate for yourself. You can make decisions knowing that policy and best practice don’t always align.

And that’s where your power lies.

Understanding this isn’t about fear - it’s about awareness. And with awareness comes confidence. Confidence to trust your instincts. Confidence to question recommendations. Confidence to create a birth experience that aligns with your values, not just hospital protocols.

Because you are not a passenger in your own birth, and neither is your baby.

What Needs to Change?

We need to shift the conversation away from intervention being the default.

Interventions save lives when they are necessary. But a system that prioritises routine medicalisation over trust in birth is not one that is serving families well.

Birth is not a process to be micromanaged.

It is an event that requires trust, support, and physiological space to unfold - something we are rapidly losing sight of.

If I was a farmer and half my animals needed surgery just to birth, I would be re-evaluating everything about my practices.

Maybe it’s time we do the same with maternity care.

💡 If birth was designed to unfold without interference, how would that change the way you prepare? What would support look like if it centred around trust in your body rather than managing risk?

✨ If you're preparing for birth, what do you feel you need to confidently navigate this system? Let’s chat - drop your thoughts in the comments or reply, I’d love to support you in thinking this through!