How we met: ‘I was trying to have a baby alone when we matched on a dating app’

Emmy was on en route to Athens to try artificial insemination when she started chatting to Andy. Now they have a child together

After turning 30 in 2018, Emmy made the life-changing decision to have a baby alone. “I had always really wanted children,” she says. “But when I did a fertility MOT, I discovered I had low egg reserves.” Single, and reluctant to wait for a suitable partner to come along, she began the process of IVF. “I naively thought it would work, but I had a couple of miscarriages in the early stages.”

In February 2020, she travelled to Athens to try artificial insemination by a donor. “I’ve lived and worked in Greece and loved it. It was cheaper and I had friends to stay with,” she says. Before she landed, she matched on a dating app with a man from Liverpool called Andy, and they began to chat. “I’d been single for about four years and was quite happy in my own world,” he says. “But I was open to meeting someone and I found Emmy really engaging.”

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NHS pilots pregnancy screening that may cut racial disparities in baby deaths

Tool addresses inequalities in UK, where stillbirth and perinatal death rates are high for black and Asian babies

The NHS is piloting a new artificial intelligence pregnancy screening tool that could dramatically reduce racial disparities in baby death rates.

Stillbirth and perinatal death rates are comparatively high for black and Asian babies in the UK, studies have shown. Now the Tommy’s National Centre for Maternity Improvement, led by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives, has successfully designed and trialled a tool that could help end the scandal.

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It would be a moral and medical disaster if Britain became a surrogacy centre | Catherine Bennett

‘Routine’ childbirth is dangerous. Let’s not add commodified women to the risk list

With its torrents of blood, animal howling, vagina hilarity and creepy relish in terms such as “cord prolapse”, “ovarian torsion”, “placental abruption”, the television adaptation of Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt has not pleased everyone.

Yet if some of us were unlikely to enjoy pleasantries such as Kay’s “same shit, different vagina”, with others finding its scenes of chaotic maternity staff and mashed innards actively disturbing, you could also see this ugliness as a potentially helpful corrective to enduring, often officially encouraged myths about the desirability of all-natural deliveries. This tendency probably contributed to tragedies like those at first hushed up at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust. Only the intervention of bereaved mothers, as the BBC’s Panorama has reported, brought the hospital’s avoidable fatalities to light. The senior midwife, Donna Ockenden, who will soon publish her final report on the scandal, has previously told Panorama about the maternity unit’s pride in its low-intervention births. “Low caesarean section rates were a prize.”

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Expectant mothers are too often treated as an inconvenience | Zoe Williams

The BBC’s new show This Is Going to Hurt is about overstretched doctors – but patronising pregnant women is a long-standing problem

It’s funny, isn’t it, childbirth? Periodically, someone says something true about whether or not it hurts (I won’t pick a side here), and there’s a flurry of panic that people will be put off doing it and that’ll be the end of the species. In real life, nobody has ever been discouraged from reproducing by its harsh realities, any more than Roy Orbison could deter you from falling in love. Pain is very abstract until it’s almost upon you, and by then it’s too late.

But that isn’t the main charge against This Is Going to Hurt, the BBC’s adaptation of former doctor Adam Kay’s ward diary. Rather, it’s that the series, and by inference the diaries themselves, lift the lid on the casual disrespect, bordering on misogyny, with which obstetricians treat mothers. This, again, is a hardy perennial. As a criticism of Kay, it’s way off: the system he describes is of doctors so overstretched as to leave you in awe.

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Abandon ‘normal birth’ targets, hospitals in England told

Letter to maternity units says action to limit caesarean sections is potentially ‘unsafe’ and clinically inappropriate

Hospitals in England have been told to abandon targets aimed at limiting the number caesarean sections carried out, over fears for the safety of mothers and babies.

Maternity units were told in a letter to stop pursuing “normal births”, with the chief midwife describing the targets as potentially “unsafe” and clinically inappropriate.

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Mothers and newborns kept apart unnecessarily in hospital due to Covid

Birth charities call for update of ‘draconian’ rules that isolate maternity patients from babies and leave women traumatised

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Mothers are being unnecessarily separated from their newborns in some hospitals due to overly-stringent Covid-19 rules, leading birth charities have warned.

They say inconsistent policies by some trusts mean parents have been made to isolate away from their babies for longer than national guidance stipulates – either after having Covid or as a contact of a positive case.

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Growing sales of breast milk online amid warnings about risks

Exclusive: Human breast milk can contain harmful bacteria, drugs and viruses, say health experts

Experts have sounded the alarm over a growing trend for selling human breast milk online, warning that it can contain harmful bacteria, drugs and viruses including HIV.

The concerns prompted eBay to remove listings from its platform, saying it had updated its automatic filters to stop breast milk being sold on the site in future.

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Cultural birthing practices are what Indigenous women need, it’s time we invested | Melanie Briggs for IndigenousX

Birthing on country and Aboriginal community-controlled services put culture at the centre of health and wellness which means better outcomes

Indigenous women have been birthing since time immemorial, when the lands were pure and the dreaming stories were a reality. Birthing is the first ceremonial journey we go through to leave the spirit world to come into the physical world. Our connection to our ancestors and our culture provides our people with a sense of belonging and grounds our ways of knowing, being and doing.

For thousands of years Indigenous women have used traditional birthing medicines and methods while caring for women in labour, birth and postpartum periods. A continuation of thousands of years of knowledge that has been diluted and overtaken by the western models of medical care. The dispossession of traditional Indigenous birthing methodologies has led to the loss of cultural birthing practices, languages and self-determination of the oldest living peoples on the planet. But we are still here and not defeated!

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Pregnant mother’s vaccination protects baby from Covid – study

Research finds much lower risk of infant hospitalisation when mother had mRNA vaccine during pregnancy

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Babies whose mothers get vaccinated against Covid-19 during pregnancy are less likely to be admitted to hospital for the disease after they are born, a study suggests.

The new findings are the first real-world evidence that pregnant women can not only protect themselves by getting vaccinated but can also protect their newborn infants.

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A moment that changed me: having a baby in lockdown nearly broke me – but it made me face my depression

After my son was born, I lost the ability to cope. But seeking help opened my eyes to other issues I had long silently lived with

I discovered I was pregnant unexpectedly, in November 2019. My body quickly began to make it clear that my experience was not going to match society’s dominant image of a glowing, happy and relaxed pregnancy. After almost five months of constant nausea – which felt as if I was trying to hide my worst hangover every single day – I hit what I thought was rock bottom. I turned to Google for an answer to my question: “Is it normal to feel miserable when you’re pregnant?” and realised that I ticked all the boxes for antenatal depression. There was a slight sense of relief that I wasn’t the first person to feel like this. But the problem felt too big for me to deal with, and too jarring with what was expected – happiness and smiles – for me to seek any help.

In March, the nausea finally began to subside, and that was enough for me to shrug off my suspicions of depression. I returned to my weekly dance class and was hopeful I could finally get back to being me. Then, on 23 March, we entered lockdown. I spent the next three months seeing virtually no one apart from my partner. I wandered around Tottenham Marshes and managed two garden meet-ups with my mum.

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How $10 radios and taxi bikes are helping to end the mutilation of girls

Across the continent, young Africans are using their unique local knowledge and bargaining power to challenge beliefs about female genital mutilation

• ‘Men must be involved in the fight against girls being cut, it’s a violation’

It took courage for Ayodeji Bella to raise the subject of female genital mutilation in her rural community in southern Nigeria. She knew local chiefs were key to challenging beliefs around the practice but when Bella, who was cut at five, broached the issue with an elder from her village, she was rebuked.

“I was young and unmarried and they wouldn’t take me seriously.”

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Caesareans or vaginal births: should mothers or medics have the final say?

More babies are born by C-section than ever, causing alarm at the WHO. But some believe the option should always be offered. So what are the risks and benefits?

When Elizabeth Chloe Romanis first considered the ethics of chosen caesarean sections, she was listening to a radio programme her husband had sent her. The programme was about how some NHS trusts refused to give medically unnecessary C-sections to people who wanted them. “He sent it to me like: ‘Have you heard this?’ and obviously I got very annoyed,” says the biolaw researcher at Durham University.

Someone phoned in and asked, why should the NHS offer the choice when childbirth is natural and surgery costs money? Irritated, Romanis thought someone from her field ought to argue for the right to choose. “So that’s what I did,” she says.

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Living in a woman’s body: it’s a potent myth that all women want children – but I have experienced other wonders

The lie that all women have a yearning to be a mother can feel like biological gaslighting. I’ve had a different kind of life – and it is meaningful, rewarding, joyous

When I was 28 years old, the first of my university friends gave birth. We marvelled over her baby, but her tone changed when I started to talk about my future because, well, “Was I planning …?” and: “Wasn’t I thinking about …?” and: “Didn’t I want to have children?”

Until that moment, I had not asked myself the question. I thought it was no longer something that had to be asked, or answered; this was the 00s, not the 50s. Women no longer ran their lives by the internalised tick-list of husband, house and baby. But in the following decade, the world began to look and sound as if it was full of timeless, retrograde anxieties and paranoias over fertility windows and body clocks.

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