I am pregnant. Funny things happen to you when you are pregnant, and not all of them involve being sick into your hands or telling your long-suffering boyfriend that you are going away to join the circus because he has decided to cook spaghetti bolognese for dinner rather than the stir-fry you specifically asked for. No. The funniest thing of all, I have found, is how low down the NHS’s love list pregnant women tend to come. Essentially, you’re there at the bottom, hanging out with MRSA and hoping that someone – anyone – will find time to explain the “benefits” to you of a home birth over a hospital one, or whether your baby is at risk of Down’s syndrome.  I’ll tell you how little the health of pregnant women – and more importantly, their babies – seems to matter to anyone at all: over the past week, I have read countless tweets, blog posts and articles about what a monster and a misogynist Jeremy Hunt is for believing that the abortion limit should be brought down to 12 weeks, but not a single outraged response to this newspaper’s revelations that wards in a fifth of hospitals are at risk of being axed, many of them maternity units. In my mind, this is just as big an act of misogyny by the powers that be, but in the hysteria that surrounds the abortion debate, every other women’s issue drops to the bottom of the pile.  Gnar! Was it morning sickness I experienced when Hunt let his thoughts be known, or plain old nausea? I don’t agree with the man one jot, but I also recognise that his personal views are about as likely to have any legislative effect as I am to give birth to a dodo. And perhaps that is what stuck in my throat – it’s all this screaming and shouting about things that are never going to happen, while every day women experience really poor health care because there simply aren’t enough midwives employed by the NHS.  Anyone who is passionately pro-choice should be kicking up a stink about the proposals to close or downgrade one in nine consultant-led maternity wards in England, thus removing many women’s right to choose to give birth in a hospital, with doctors present. Instead, much cheaper midwife-led units are suggested, the argument being that women who attend them are less likely to end up needing epidurals and caesareans (a moot point, given that these places can’t actually provide either service).  We should be angrier that 3,000 midwives were promised by David Cameron in his election campaign, but only 900 have actually been delivered since the Coalition came to power. We should be furious that tales of maternity units closing their doors to women are all too commonplace, with the NHS watchdog warning in June that maternity care is “emerging as a problem area for a number of NHS Trusts, due to midwife numbers not increasing in line with demand and an increase in complex births, owing to risk factors such as maternal age, weight and co-morbidity”. Ladies, why are we not getting hysterical about this?  I hear all these tales of two-hour waits for routine ante-natal blood tests, and grouchy midwives. A friend told me about her three-day labour, which involved several different midwives, the final woman so exhausted as she came off a long shift that she cut the baby’s cord instead of clamping it. My own experiences of maternity care so far have been a mixed bag, my GP’s first question to me not being “How are you feeling?”, but a growl of “Do you want to keep it?”  Yes, I did want to keep it, I replied, though I wonder now if I would have been treated with more interest and compassion had I decided otherwise. He scribbled me out a prescription for something I later discovered you shouldn’t take before the second trimester, and told me he would send a letter to the hospital, who would then be in touch with me. They never were – it turned out the GP surgery had forgotten to complete my referral.  On the advice of the hospital’s maternity unit, who had clearly heard of forgetful GPs before, I filled out the complicated medical form myself. When I started bleeding a few weeks later, I didn’t bother troubling my GP with any fears that I might be miscarrying – instead, my boyfriend insisted we went straight to A&E, where I was seen within half an hour, put on a drip, and given the next available appointment at the hospital’s Early Pregnancy Unit (EPU) for an emergency scan. And it was there, under the kind watch of clearly over-worked staff, that I saw my baby’s heartbeat for the first time.  They were brilliant, really they were. What would we have done without them? A rhetorical question for us, but all too real for future mothers-to-be. I have just learnt that the EPU in question is one of the many across the country that faces the axe. Another little erosion of a woman’s basic right to health care.
Our focus on those who don&rsquo;t want babies blinds us to the difficulties faced   by those who do