Column

But can the market deliver?

Eric the Heretic bears down on the market niche of ‘independent midwifery’

Commercialising medicine is like lifting a stone to see the crawly things. Normally they keep away from us, and we avoid them. Not now! Every invertebrate is our equal, as long as they have the dosh. Worse, each idea is as good as another, if it can find a market niche.

Take having babies in the marketplace. Not literally, though there’s bound to be somebody who rates pushing amongst the fruit and veg as really down to earth, but as an expression of ‘choice’. Now babies get born any which way, at home, under water, with string quintets in the background, and their doting parents make real Life Events out of it all with camcorders whirring and flash guns a’popping.

Pregnant women are a bit odd — but who isn’t when they’ve got something growing inside them? Being odd is normal enough, but stoking the fires of oddity by proclaiming birth as a form of orgasm, or as a moment of self-realisation only possible if orchestrated by an expensive Gallic ‘accoucheur’, is way off-beam.

Vultures gather around the weak, and gullible women — and some of their men — attract exploiters who soothe worries about cold, heartless hospitals and the machine-like indifference of modern medicine, for a fee. These stories may be true enough, even if they are only the output of second-rate journalism in the ever wider, ever more trivial range of ‘women’s magazines’, but some face them head on whilst others hide away in a market niche.

The escapist fantasies of the vulnerable and gullible are their own problem — until they expect the rest of us to get on board. The staggering old NHS is now expected to indulge the anti-technology lobby, fill up the birthing pools, and turn out the midwives for home births for overconfident, inexperienced women who know nothing of labour and birth. Worse, when the ‘independent’ midwives get it wrong the problems land at the door of the nearest NHS labour ward.

This is just another chance for the middle class to hog the resources that all should share, and get their own precious way. In time it will go sour, when ‘independent’ midwives overstep their competence and end up in court, or get struck off. NHS managers might calculate the costs of appeasing the muesli eaters, and eventually they will cut out the luxuries.

The private hospitals might be more sensitive for longer, at least until the fashion changes or the litigation starts. Then the choice brigade will regret they ever entered the market. They will have made their cosy niche unprofitable, and the supply of soothing fantasies will be turned off, as it happens by a coldly indifferent commercial machine.