there but for the grace
on birth trauma, institutional failure and perniciousness of gratitude
Yesterday morning I stood in my kitchen chopping vegetables for soup half-listening to Women’s Hour on Radio 4 when I heard the voice of Helen Gittos, a Scotswoman from Margate. She was quietly describing the short life of her daughter Harriet, to whom she gave birth at Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in 2014. The birth was what in middle-class-dinner-parlance is known as “a shit-show.” The details are so familiar as to almost be irrelevant. If you haven’t lived it, you’ve probably heard it all before. Labouring mother in mind-shattering pain, trapped baby, dipping heart rate, raw animal panic, botched interventions that were, in this particular case, too little, too much or too late.
Listening to Gittos, I froze where I stood, knife hovering above the chopping block, onion fumes stinging my eyes. I found myself leaning into the counter, struggling to catch my breath. It was the evenness of her tone that killed me. The practiced numbness of it. She was a woman telling a story she’d told hundreds of times before and knew she would tell hundreds of times more, a reluctant narrator of human tragedy on dull repeat. The host gently asked Gittos what it had been like during those eight days between the bloody hysteria of the delivery room and the yawning silence of Harriet’s death.
“She was just beautiful,” Gittos recalled, “just like a perfectly healthy sleeping baby. Except she was a baby who couldn’t open her eyes or cry.”
Harriet was one of fifteen newborns who died from preventable and unnecessary injury in botched births at two hospitals in Margate and Ashford between 2009 and 2020. The scandal prompted an independent review, led Dr. Bill Kirkup. His report, published yesterday, examines up to 200 incidents involving birthing mothers and babies at East Kent Hospitals Trust. To say it makes for devastating reading is an understatement. The report gives a hearing to a litany of bereaved parents describing how their unfathomable grief at the preventable injury and/or loss of their babies. They also spoke of how their grief was compounded, insult added to unspeakable injury, when hospital staff refused to acknowledge wrongdoing and more often than not, treated their desperate search for answers with unbridled contempt.
"Their response to their poor medical judgements was to blame me," is how Kelli Rudolph put it in another interview. "That is what I've had to live with.” Her daughter Celandine died of brain injury at five days old, after she was born at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford in 2016.
2016, as it happens, is the same year my youngest son Frank was born, at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London, less than fifty miles from from Kent. I went into labour a month early, waters slapping the tile floor like a comedy while I was bathing my elder son for bed. Frankie was born about 18 hours later, on the mild grey morning of September 10th. His birth was also a shitshow — but one that resulted in a much better outcome. Both of us came out of it battered but alive. Listening to the bereaved mothers of Margate and Ashford, I was struck yet again by how easily it could have gone the other way — how I might have been the quiet voice on the radio and Helen Gittos or Kelli Rudolph the woman frozen over her chopping board, winded, having just returned from dropping her healthy child at school.
Frank and I are among the lucky ones. His very existence is a huge consolation, of course it is. My son lived and their daughters did not. And because of this stark fact it has felt wrong to me somehow — histrionic, self-centred — to even begin to compare our case to that of Helen and Harriet’s or Kelli and Celadine’s. For years after our own private shit-show when I heard such stories in the news, I felt nothing but immense there-but-there-but-for-the-grace-of-god relief.
I’m still grateful today. But six years later, gratitude not all that I feel. Like Gittos and Rudolph, I remain bewildered and yes, angry, not just on my behalf but theirs. Even in my immense good fortune, I am acutely aware that there-but-for-the-grace isn’t good enough. It can’t be, it isn’t. We live in a country where healthy women should be able give birth to healthy babies in hospital with more assurance than falling on the right side of dumb luck.
Frankie is six now, and prefers to go by Frank. He’s a bright, curious boy with mop of dark blonde curls, a sensitive heart and a sly insouciant wit. He’s obsessed with Batman and footie, dancing to hip hop, belching the alphabet and devising new ways to smuggle iPads into bed. He loves jigsaw puzzles, mathletics, curried chicken and Team Titans Go! For Halloween he’s dressing up as a killer clown. As his doctors are forever reminding us, he’s a happy, healthy boy — the perfect and only version of himself.
(Look how insanely excited he is for his first day of Big School. That’s a kid who loves life.)
But despite our incredible bounty, it’s worth noting that six years on, the injurious effects of Frank’s birth continue to reveal themselves in ways both subtle and obvious. Perhaps if enough babies had died or been injured at Queen Charlotte’s as they were in Kent, someone might have asked his father and I to recount our story, Frank’s story, in the hope of isolating a root cause, the essential failure in the system that might be fixed. But as it stands, there-but-but-for-the-grace is the only consolation we get.
I’ve written about Frank’s birth before — in a long cover feature for the Observer Magazine back in 2017. It’s in the public domain, do have read it if you’re interested. But really, all you need to know is that it was a shit show that ended with a forceps delivery that resulted in a flatline birth. That piece prompted an outpouring unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my career. Years later I still receive emails about it on a regular basis from bewildered postpartum mothers trying to reconcile their own traumatic birth experiences, maimed or lost babies and shattered lives. I respond to them all with care.
Because of these mothers who write to me, and out of respect for the bereaved, I’ve been reticent about talking about about the knock-on effects of Frank’s awful birth. But listening to Dittos and Rudolph yesterday, something else occurred to me. Not only is there-but-for-the-grace not good enough — self-soothing by cleaving to lucky-stars gratitude serves a covert purpose: It shuts women up.
In truth, the events of Frank’s birth continue to haunt our family, both in subtle and obvious ways. The physical afflictions are treatable, not life-threatening, but along the way the initial trauma has been compounded by our uncertainty over causal links.
Whatever went wrong at Frank’s birth was undoubtedly the result of a public maternity healthcare system at breaking point. But why did it happen? How could it have been prevented? And how does it related to everything that’s happened since? I’ve decided to tell our story because I think it’s important in that it demonstrates that even a “successful” shit show has serious lingering effects.