For years I struggled with infertility and loss. Then I had a life-changing call with a psychic

On some level, I realised it was a bit unhinged, writes the author and podcaster Elizabeth Day. But what did I have to lose?

On 29 December 2022, I received a text. ‘Hi mum I’m texting you off a friends phone I’ve smashed mine and their phones about to die, can you WhatsApp my new number x’ I was in a rental car when I got it, my partner at the wheel next to me as we drove down an anonymous stretch of motorway. Both the sky and the road were grey. It was that indeterminate space between Christmas and New Year when the days become sludgy and diffuse; a time when teenagers meet up with their friends to go shopping or gather in each other’s homes and post Snapchats or exchange festive gossip while pretending not to vape. It was the time of waiting – for the next thing to happen, for the promised excitement of New Year’s Eve and snogging underneath leftover mistletoe. So it wasn’t a particularly unusual text to receive, especially not given the trademark adolescent lack of grammar and punctuation.

There was just one thing.

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Digested week: Return of the cassette tape … and maybe the dodo

Plus the right to roam the green and pleasant, and a £1,795-a-night solution to the postpartum blues

An all-party parliamentary group is calling for everyone to be given the right to go wild camping and swimming across our green and pleasant land (and, I suppose our blue and hopefully non-besewaged waters). Apparently we only have the right to roam across 8% of England at the moment, a situation that strikes me as so perfectly us that it should be submitted to the Unesco intangible cultural heritage list immediately if not sooner.

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We’re losing so many mothers to childbirth and genocide. It’s our responsibility to act on both | Jacinda Ardern

We know women give birth during war – and too often, they die. But we must do much more to achieve safety and stability

• Jacinda Ardern is a former prime minister of New Zealand

It was usually when my daughter hadn’t slept that the conversation started. I’d message my friend wondering aloud whether I would get through the day without making some glaring mistake. I was the prime minister of New Zealand. Only the second woman in the world to have a baby while leading a country, and some days were hard.

Yet there was one response, a simple text message from my friend, also deep in the trenches of caregiving, that would stop me in my tracks: “Women give birth during war.”

Jacinda Ardern is a former prime minister of New Zealand

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Systemic racism affects maternity care for black women in England, say MPs

Commons committee finds women’s concerns not taken seriously due to bias, stereotyping and racist assumptions

Black women in England are still facing poorer outcomes in their maternity care due to systemic racism, alongside failures in leadership and data collection, according to a group of MPs.

Across the UK, black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with their white counterparts, while babies born to black mothers are at an increased risk of stillbirth.

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Mississippi declares infant deaths emergency as CDC program that could have helped is halted

State forced to stop gathering critical data on pregnancy experiences after Trump administration’s shakeup

The Trump administration’s shakeup of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has forced Mississippi to stop gathering critical data on women’s experiences before, during and after pregnancy – even as the state recently declared a public health emergency over its surging infant mortality rate.

Mississippi has suspended data collection for Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (Prams), a national database that has been integral to policymaking on maternal and infant health for nearly four decades, the Guardian has learned.

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The US town that pays every pregnant woman $1,500: ‘We’re not OK with our babies being born into poverty’

Infants in Rx Kids in Flint, Michigan, saw lower rates of prematurity and other issues, saving millions in NICU visits

When Angela Sintery first learned about Rx Kids, a program for new mothers in her home town of Flint, Michigan, she thought someone must be trying to scam her.

“I had some teacher friends that kept sending me links saying: ‘You need to apply for this. It’s a brand-new program. We think you qualify,’” Sintery said. But it seemed too good to be true.

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Reasons for rise in caesarean births | Letter

Simply blaming women ignores a range of clinical and societal factors that contribute to the increase in medical intervention during birth, says Dr Debbie Garrod

The rise in the rate of medically assisted births in the UK, particularly caesareans, is laid firmly at the feet of women for being older, larger and having more complex medical problems (Report, 11 September). This ignores a range of clinical and societal factors that contribute. Maternal factors play a part, but so does the rise in defensive clinical practice, the loss of midwives’ and obstetricians’ skills and confidence in supporting physiological birth, and the proliferation of misinformation and scare stories on social media that increase parental anxiety.

All these factors have led us to the current crisis, where more than 50% of babies are born with surgical intervention, with no concomitant improvement in maternal or perinatal mortality and with unknown consequences for the health and wellbeing of future generations.
Dr Debbie Garrod
Midwife and antenatal educator, Abingdon, Oxfordshire

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