Women give birth: how they do it is no one else’s business

The Green party has backtracked on its ‘natural birth’ policy. Demonising C-sections harks back to the bad old days of ‘too posh to push’

Sometimes, when I’m reflecting on how far we’ve come since the 1990s, I think about the phrase “too posh to push”. How disgustingly, physiologically misogynistic that phrase is, and how cavalierly people just … said it, as though how a woman decides to give birth – through her vagina or from an incision in her abdomen – was a matter of public debate. Back then, it really was. The tabloids were full of speculation about whether female celebrities gave birth vaginally or not, and the general public adopted the catchphrase, feeding the (false) impression that many women were choosing to have caesarean sections simply for the sake of convenience.

I’d be shocked, these days, to hear someone roll that out. Yet myths about caesareans are still peddled. Take a policy from the Green party’s website, now hastily deleted after a deserved backlash: “We will work to reduce the number of interventions in childbirth, and change the culture of the NHS so that birth is treated as a normal and non-medical event.” C-sections were described as “expensive and, when not medically required, risky”.