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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