Maternity care in the UK is in a doom loop – how has it come to this? | Zoe Williams

Twenty years ago, if a pregnant woman had asked for a C-section because of her fears over poor staffing levels, midwives would have thought she was over-anxious. Now, it seems like a depressingly realist position The classic way to outrage someone who’s pregnant is to touch their stomach without asking. I would never do that and it never, back in the day, happened to me – but I always thought, as outrageous as it might hypothetically be, that it also stood as a vivid analogy for the generalised social intrusiveness you get while you’re visibly pregnant.

Endless questions about how you’re feeling, when you’re due, what hospital you’re going to, whether it’s a boy or a girl, how much time you have off. I hated this interrogation 20 years ago, but now I do it on a reflex; some driving force of human fellowship makes me want to know. I realised mid-sentence, asking a stranger about hospitals – and replying “That’s a great hospital, my sister had her kids in there” – that it must be even more grating than it was in the 00s. My nieces are 19 and 21 now, and that great hospital, unless it’s magically unconnected to the rest of the NHS, has probably changed quite a lot. The NHS Alliance has announced that up to 20 of the country’s 155 smaller, consultant-led maternity units, mostly in rural or coastal areas, might have…