“Manipulative and coercive language was used to force me to go along with their care plan – one doctor told me my baby would be born with cerebral palsy if I didn’t consent to a procedure and did an impression of what someone with this condition looks like,” she said.Ī woman of African-Caribbean heritage said her first experience of her local maternity services was discovering that there was no category to match her ethnicity when she was filling out a form. The experience left me feeling humiliated, disempowered and ashamed.”ĭuring labour she was denied pain relief and told she must have a low pain threshold. “I was treated like a vessel, not like a human. “There is a stereotype of Asian women that we are tame, quiet and compliant people who have no voice and will be obedient. “I felt unsafe and like maternity professionals are not used to being challenged by brown women,” she said. Testimonies include that of a British Bangladeshi woman who said her labour concerns were dismissed.

Black women are four times more likely than white women to die during pregnancy or childbirth in the UK. It comes as parliament is due on 19 April to debate the large racial disparity in maternal mortality in British hospitals, after a petition from the campaign group Five X More gathered 187,519 signatures.

Parents respond to h and m ad