The National Childbirth Trust charity STILL tries to guilt mothers into natural births

Britain’s biggest childbirth charity has continued to ‘blame’ women for natural births despite an obsession with being blamed for unnecessary deaths, the Daily Mail can reveal.

The National Childbirth Trust (NCT) also removed articles claiming ‘natural’ labor left mothers more ‘satisfied’ days before the Ockenden report into the biggest maternity scandal in NHS history.

The NCT, which received more than £1million in government grants and contracts last year, runs fee-based prenatal classes for more than 90,000 mostly middle-class expectant parents each year.

For many first-time mothers, these courses are an essential source of information. But women who recently took classes said some teachers remained obsessed with natural births and made them feel that any intervention, even taking paracetamol, was shameful.

Others said the NCT made them feel they had “failed” because they had a life-saving C-section, with one telling a teacher to “cry” over his emergency C-section. The NCT was a driving force against what it saw as the overmedicalization of work.

Last month, the Ockenden Report revealed that the preventable deaths of 201 babies and nine mothers in Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust were partly due to the refusal of cesareans for women.

Following the report, the NCT said it changed its policy in 2019 to no longer promote “one way over another” for childbirth.

But Rebecca Matthews, an education lecturer who is completing a doctorate in birth trauma, said mothers who took NCT classes last year said they were encouraged to avoid induction and interventions because they would lead to a “cascade of interventions”, and were unprepared for the risks of vaginal delivery.

The NCT, which received more than £1million in government grants and contracts last year, runs fee-based prenatal classes for more than 90,000 middle-class expectant parents each year (file image)

She added: “The NCT is a multi-million pound charity which does great work, but they actively promote – along with many other antenatal organizations – vaginal birth without intervention as safe and stigmatizing all other modes of birth. ‘childbirth.”

Clarabella Gray, of the Infant Feeding Alliance campaign, completed the NCT prenatal course in 2019 and completed a refresher course in 2021.

She said: ‘It concerns me that mothers are potentially experiencing some form of psychological or physical trauma due to their birth experiences being vastly different from the rhetoric of influential organizations, such as the NCT.’

On Mumsnet, one woman claimed her NCT teacher told her group, “If a doctor looks into your labor room, that will be enough to disrupt your hormones and stall labor.”

The charity posted articles on its website until at least March 6 saying: “You are more likely to feel satisfied with a spontaneous vaginal birth than if your labor was induced or accelerated…”

One was linked to what he called the Royal College of Midwives’ (RCM) ‘Normal Birth Campaign’ website. The MRC abandoned this campaign in 2017, acknowledging that it could have been “misleading”.

Since 2017, the NCT has secured around £2.5m in government contracts and £1.1m in grants.

An NCT spokesperson said: “We are not here to promote one way over another, but to ensure parents have access to factual information and a network of peer and expert support. .” She said the content of the antenatal classes was “reviewed and updated extensively” in 2019 and should now cover all methods of childbirth.