Medicalised

Annette was admitted to unsuitable and medicalised environments for months at a time causing her stress and reducing her independence.

Cooper’s obstetrics training, she says, was “a very medicalised programme and I didn't get a lot of experience with unmedicated, low-intervention births”.

Regardless of whether women choose to have medicalised births, or c-sections, or home births, Cooper says the important point is that they understand all their options, including risks and ways to mitigate them.

The current figure also includes deaths reported by elderly care homes and other medicalised care facilities.

The path to parenthood, as it unfolded, had been invasive and constant, shocking in its intensity, grief-inducing, medicalised and without pleasure until my girl was born.