Is it safe to give birth in England?

The stillbirth rate in England has fallen from 5.1 per 1,000 births in 2010 to 3.53 in 2022 — a 31% reduction^[1] driven by the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle, introduced in 2016^[2], which standardised foetal movement monitoring, growth surveillance, smoking cessation support, and term induction policies. The picture on maternal mortality is far more troubling: the UK rate of 9.7 deaths per 100,000 maternities has barely moved in a decade, and the Ockenden Review (2022) found that hundreds of babies and multiple mothers died or were seriously harmed over 20 years at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust^[3] due to understaffing, failure to escalate, and systemic reluctance to listen to women. NHS England's 2025 ambition — to halve stillbirth, neonatal death, maternal death, and brain injury rates from a 2010 baseline — has been partially met only for stillbirths.

The starkest failure is the persistent racial disparity in maternal mortality: Black women in the UK are 3.7 times more likely to die during or shortly after pregnancy than white women, Asian women 1.8 times more likely — gaps documented in MBRRACE-UK reports for over 20 years without meaningful narrowing.^[4] Unconscious bias in clinical decision-making, higher rates of underlying conditions linked to socioeconomic deprivation, and barriers to antenatal education compound one another. Around 1 in 5 women experience birth as traumatic, with an estimated 30,000 developing PTSD annually — a burden concentrated among those who already faced the greatest clinical risk.