I wasn’t going to write about the horrific findings of the Ockenden report, the many devastating errors at maternity units in Nottingham hospitals. The woman, for example, who went in to have a caesarean, only to discover she’d been given an “inadvertent cystectomy”: they’d cut her bladder out by mistake. Or the dead baby stuffed in a bin as “clinical waste”; or the woman who was told to terminate a healthy pregnancy.
Or the heavily pregnant mother in labour who telephoned the hospital nine times, crying and begging to come in, only to discover, when she was finally allowed in to give birth — having been sent home once — that her baby had died. “I’m sorry, your baby’s dead,” said a staff member. Only minutes earlier, they had been offering “aromatherapy”, fussing over the birthing pool, asking what kind of music she’d like.
The vanity of it.
What happens when a society gets so carried away with itself — with an ideology, an aromatherapeutic way of being — that it abandons all empathy, all reason?