Illogic and the perils of groupthink in the producer interest

There’s a certain illogic here:

Second, women’s healthcare is under-researched and under-evidenced.

It is possible that is true but we’d insist that it rather conflicts with this piece of evidence:

It is a miracle of modern medicine that the joy of getting pregnant no longer has to be tempered with the very real prospect that you or your baby may not survive the birth. A true marker of human progress is the fact that maternal and infant mortality have dropped dramatically in the UK even as births have become more complicated, with babies getting bigger and women having children later.

As Sonia Sadha goes on to point out the historical figures for au naturelle birth were maternal death rates of perhaps one in 25. Per vivparity that was, not per lifetime. A reasonable guess at today’s number for the UK is 0.012% or so, not that 4%.

We’d not claim that as a result of something being under-researched.

However, on the second point:

Until just a few years ago, this was widely embraced by the establishment: a working group including the National Childbirth Trust, the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, advocated for “normal birth” without medical interventions such as an epidural or caesarian section.

This has certainly been a factor in women and babies being denied life-saving care: at Morecambe Bay, midwives pursued non-medical births “at any cost”, bullying those doctors who tried to intervene. At Shrewsbury and Telford, there was a multi-professional focus on “normal birth” at “pretty much any cost”.

Entirely so. A certain groupthin, a coalescing, among the producer interest, around a specific ideology and set of practices. And damn the consumer interest, this is what we shall impose whether the customers - sorry, patients - like it or not.

Which is the argument against having a monopoly upon the supply of anything, isn’t it?