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One of the many benefits of American independence is that his majesty’s government cannot impose its medical system upon us. In the U.S., socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders aims to force all doctors and patients into a government-run plan he calls “Medicare for all.” Meanwhile Britain’s National Health Service continues to show how badly Sanders-style bureaucracy mistreats patients. The U.K.’s government system has been proudly mismanaging medical resources since the 1940s. Now one critic is comparing the treatment of expectant mothers to British health care of the 1530s. In response to an appalling coverup of abuses by the government’s health service in Nottingham, Claire Cohen writes in the Sunday Times of London: The other day, I left the house in the actual evening to see 1536. The play (which is being made into a BBC series) follows the lives of three women in the days around Anne Boleyn’s execution and, of course, one of the themes is how many women and babies died in childbirth back then. The bloody reality is
there to see but, my God, were the midwives trying their best to save them, even when all they had was hot water and torn up bedsheets to work with. Did we care more about pregnant women during the reign of Henry VIII? That probably sounds absurd, but it’s what I thought when I read about Donna Ockenden’s new report into the Nottingham maternity scandal. You know the script by now: women’s pleas ignored, warning signs and parental concerns dismissed, c-sections refused, blame culture, denials, cover-ups, grieving families ignored and left scrabbling around for the truth. A culture of impunity among midwives who laughed at distress and deliberately assigned difficult births to junior staff to see if they would “sink or swim”.
Heartbreaking, tragic, avoidable deaths and life-limiting disabilities — in 2026, not 1536. My heart goes out to them all. It’s “there but for the grace of …” stuff, isn’t it? Any parent who’s read about Nottingham — or the maternity scandals in Shrewsbury and Telford, Morecambe Bay, East Kent, or any of the 14 trusts currently under investigation — will have felt that. Angry, scared, helpless and that it might have been any of us. A friend messaged to say she felt exactly this way in the aftermath of Ockenden’s 2022 report into Shrewsbury, faced with the prospect of giving birth on the NHS herself a few weeks later, rigid with fear. Were my own worries about the treatment I might (not) get on the labour ward — my local being rated
“inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission and a rumour flying around that a senior doctor had been disciplined for being drunk on the job — part of the reason I chose an elective c-section? Undoubtedly, yes. Steve Jones reports for the BBC on government doing what government does:
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