Meanwhile, women are turning to self interested “influencers” who are profiting from fear and potentially compounding the harm initiated by maternity services. It is women and babies who are losing while there are no consequences for those complicit.

Providing individualised care promotes safety. When women are pushed out of services we expose them to greater risk. Maternity services must prioritise treating women with respect and recognising diverse and nuanced needs.

National and international guidelines as well as NMC and GMC codes emphasise that women should be treated as individuals, with respect for their own wishes and needs. And yet this is not happening in practice; guidelines are used as a tool to coerce women into submission.

Praying on women’s trauma, making money off them, deceiving them and leading them down a path that has the potential to cause significant harm to them or their babies is unconscionable, but there is a huge amount of blame here to be shared by the maternity system we have created.

Though most of the time birth works very well if we just leave it alone, there are some true emergencies where having a midwife there is lifesaving. I have seen those situations; I have been that midwife. It’s not common, but it happens.

We know that women generally choose the type of birth that feels best and safest to them. So we should really be looking inwards and asking why women do not feel safe to birth within a system that is (supposed to be) designed to support them through pregnancy and birth.

Sadly we know that many women who choose free birth do so because they cannot find respectful care in the system. This is a problem that has in part been created through over medicalisation, lack of choice and a failure to treat people as individuals.

I was really shocked to see that more than 50% of pre-term births are iatrogenic. That feels incredibly worrying to me.

Why, in the face of this information, are we concerned about so called "normal birth ideology"? These outcomes suggest to me that quite the opposite is true; the "ideology" maternity services are facing is highly medicalised, technocratic and ultimately short sighted.

1/3 of women are being induced and more than 50% of pre-term births are iatrogenic. What are the long term impacts caused to these babies by being born before they are ready? The effects on their microbiome, their future health and development and the epigenetic effects we know little about?

Almost 50% of women are birthing via caesarean section and there is no consideration of long term outcomes for those women and babies. How many future babies are lost to miscarriage or ectopic pregnancies? How many more women have pelvic organ damage and long term pain?

Just to be absolutely clear: midwifery and obstetrics are a team. Our goal should always be to provide respectful, safe and individualised care for women and families. Midwifery is not safe without Obstetrics in some cases, and Obstetrics could quite literally not function without midwives.