The House of Commons is an intimidating place and, as I rose to speak, my voice wavered. I had spent days researching my speech, so I was well prepared: what I hadn’t reckoned on was how revisiting the birth of my daughter, Arabella, would affect me.
As steadily as I could, I described my difficult labour, post-partum haemorrhage and being rushed into surgery – thenlying on an operating table, terrified I was about to die.
Suddenly, shockingly, I began to cry. I have always been a professional person and this was completely unexpected.
A kind, female colleague interrupted, giving me a chance to calm down. Another got me a glass of water and I took a deep breath. I somehow managed to get through the next 20 minutes.
As I finished, I heard clapping. A group of mothers, gathered to watch Parliament’s first ever debate on birth trauma, had stood in spontaneous applause.
I was embarrassed as there was a convention not to applaud in the House. The Deputy Speaker asked them to sit down but I could see that she was moved by their response. It was emotional for me too – the most unexpected moment of my political career so far.
I had been elected MP for Stafford in the Boris landslide of 2019, having run a not-for-profit organisation, the Coalition For Global Prosperity, then appointed the Government’s trade envoy to Kenya. If anything, I regarded myself as a foreign policy expert. I would never have dreamt I would make my mark in politics by championing women who had suffered from birth trauma.
That speech, in October 2023, was a turning point. Having created an all-party group dedicated to birth trauma with the then Labour MP Rosie Duffield, we chaired the first ever Birth Trauma Inquiry to be held in the UK.
In the House of Commons I described my difficult labour, post-partum haemorrhage and being rushed into surgery – then lying on an operating table, terrified I was about to die
I would never have dreamt I would make my mark in politics by championing women who had suffered from birth trauma
There remains a taboo about injuries suffered in childbirth. I had never even heard the term ‘birth trauma’ before I suffered my own. I had no idea of the postcode lottery that applies to maternity care and how inadequate it can be for both mother and baby.
When I went public, a huge number of women wrote to me sharing their stories.
Halfway through my Parliamentary term, in 2021, my partner Henry and I got married. I discovered I was pregnant that December. I took a test in the toilets outside my office, then two more tests to confirm they were all positive. I was delighted.
It was tricky keeping it secret from my family over the holidays. I took to hiding cans of Appletiser in cupboards around the house, which I used to replace the expensive Christmas champagne I poured down the toilet. I didn’t want to tell anyone until my 12-week scan.
My maternity appointments took place in London at Chelsea And Westminster Hospital, near Parliament but I planned to have my baby in Staffordshire.
I have never shared this before but I was referred by the NHS to a maternity trauma and loss care service prior to giving birth.
I had a long-standing phobia of blood and needles, and I was terrified of having to have an emergency caesarean section.
My family and even my husband did not appreciate at first how extreme my blood and needle phobia could be and how I would actively avoid blood tests, as I would faint or have an anxiety attack. In routine appointments, I would feel dizzy when a blood pressure cuff was put on my arm or if doctors discussed ‘having a Venflon in situ’ – it particularly stressed me out to think about a cannula being put in my hand during labour. I became concerned about passing out during tests in pregnancy or having a panic attack in the hospital, which might affect our baby.
When I went public, a huge number of women wrote to me sharing their stories
Terri, a specialist midwife, was patient, kind, compassionate and never made me feel foolish.
She talked me through my birth preferences and helped me to design a mental health care plan after she diagnosed me with severe anxiety.
She thought it had been partly triggered because the last time I was in the same hospital was to see my father when he died.
I was clear with Terri that I wanted to have a natural birth and to avoid any medical interventions. If I had to have a caesarean, I wanted to be put under a general anaesthetic. She suggested I pick a scent that might help me during a stressful situation such as a blood test or labour. I opted for a sea salt perfume, which I would squirt onto a handkerchief and kept a small bag of dried lavender in my handbag.
I didn’t tell any of my colleagues in Parliament about this. Politics was the worst environment for sharing vulnerabilities: weaknesses were something to be exploited by opponents.
The toxic culture in Parliament encouraged workaholism. Colleagues would boast about working an 80-hour week. By my third trimester all I wanted to do was lie down on the sofa in my office and sleep, especially in the evenings while waiting to vote.
I downloaded an app to track how my baby was progressing in the womb, read parenting blogs, listened to podcasts and signed up for antenatal classes. The best option seemed to be the National Childbirth Trust. I paid £210, which was a lot of money, as I couldn’t find any free NHS classes in Stafford or Stoke-on-Trent, where I would have my baby.
The class set me up with expectations that everything would be fine during my labour and I could completely trust the NHS staff to look after me. I explicitly asked about what would happen if things went wrong and was told I was worrying unnecessarily.
Politics was the worst environment for sharing vulnerabilities: weaknesses were something to be exploited by opponents
Near the end of my pregnancy, I could no longer face attending public events where I would be shouted at or grilled on issues from antisocial behaviour to planning, so I skipped the neighbourhood watch meeting with residents in Stafford one evening. The local councillor was furious.
I struggled to read several hundred emails a day from constituents or respond to campaigns writing to me about policy. At 36 weeks I was having a regular check-up at Stafford County Hospital, when an anxious midwife told me: ‘Your daughter’s heartbeat is skipping a beat.’ Henry’s phone pinged with a BBC News alert: ‘You might want to hear this,’ he said. Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid had quit Boris Johnson’s Cabinet.
The midwife interrupted, telling Henry he should drive me to the Royal Stoke hospital immediately.
An irregular heartbeat was serious and in the worst-case scenario, I could end up having an emergency caesarean that evening.
We waited hours at the Royal Stoke but eventually a consultant reassured me my baby’s heartbeat had calmed. I was hot, sticky and exhausted. It was four weeks until my due date, which coincidentally was also my 37th birthday, August 4. I was told to come back next day for another scan.
No one called me from the hospital the next day. I kept calling and, at last, a doctor agreed to fit me in.
I spent the final days of my pregnancy attempting to rest in the scorching summer heat and planning with my team what they could cover for me. We agreed that for the first six weeks they would contact me only with urgent matters. As an elected representative I was not entitled to regular maternity leave. It was ironic that as lawmakers we set policies that businesses had to follow but did not follow them ourselves.
We agreed that if I needed to sign anything off, my office manager James would come to my home. I assumed that I would be in a fit state, both mentally and physically, to continue to represent my constituents.
The days felt endlessly long. Then, on August 7, I thought my waters had broken. At the Royal Stoke I was referred for a pelvic examination and clambered onto the table, heaving up my large belly.
I had no idea what to expect and without any explanation the nurse inserted a large, duck-billed plastic speculum to force open my vagina.
The procedure was very painful: afterwards, I felt bruised inside from the brusque way the examination had been carried out.
The nurse told me in a bored tone that nothing had been noted on the speculum. They sent me home.
I had little understanding of what would happen if I was overdue. Induction of labour was not much covered in our antenatal classes. I was led to believe that the baby would come naturally when she was ready. At a week overdue, the hospital offered me a caesarean but I declined. I was keen to have a natural birth.
I researched recommendations for how to start labour and I tried them all: having sex, hot baths, eating spicy food, drinking raspberry leaf tea, reflexology, rocking on a fit ball and climbing the stairs multiple times a day. Nothing worked.
Over the next few days, as I watched for updates on the leadership race between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, I developed terrible backache, in addition to feeling the pressure of my baby as she pushed down on my bladder.
Henry and I went for a long countryside stroll in an attempt to ‘walk the baby out’. We got lost and had to escape through a cornfield to outrun a herd of cows but even that brought no result.
I got sporadic, painful spasms across my belly but nothing else. I went into hospital for a membrane sweep, where the midwife inserted her fingers into my cervix and swept them around in another painful examination that was recommended to try to stimulate labour. The midwife told me I would be induced by 14 days overdue and should be ready from 7am for the hospital to call but I waited all day and no one contacted me.
When I tried calling I was told there was no room for me. The next day I called every hour for an update but often there was no answer.
I panicked and called Judith, a maternity advocate I had been referred to by the mental health service. She was shocked and offered to go up to the ward and ask what was happening. Within 20 minutes I had a telephone call inviting me in.
I was finally admitted, alongside several other women, in the late afternoon on Thursday, August 18, 2022. I was put on to a bed with a thin purple curtain for privacy.
It was hot with no air conditioning and the sterile bay was tiny, with space only for a small upright chair for my husband to sit on next to all the medical equipment. Some hours later, I had my first speculum examination in a room with strip lighting that was more like an interrogation cell in a prison than a hospital.
In addition to the midwife there were two people in the room who didn’t introduce themselves but just watched. No one explained what was going to happen.
The midwife didn’t introduce herself either, just asked me brusquely to lie down on the bed and thrust a huge vaginal speculum, which looked like a pair of large plastic pliers, inside me to examine my cervix.
The examination was highly invasive and painful; I felt like I was being raped. I immediately burst into tears. Once back in my bed, I wasn’t checked on for several hours. Around 9pm I was informed by the midwife that a pessary would be used to induce labour, as my cervix was ‘closed’.
Once more, I wasn’t told what would happen next. They asked me to lie down on the bed with my knees open and inserted a pessary, to slowly release the female hormone prostaglandin to ‘ripen my cervix’.
The objective was to try to start my labour spontaneously but it failed. I was given another pessary at 1.30am. The medical staff repeatedly told me I had failed to dilate. All the language used to describe the process was negative. I was hungry and very tired.
The hospital staff changed every 12 hours and became a rotating shift of disinterested nurses who didn’t know my name. There seemed to be zero continuity of care. On Friday morning I had another painful examination and by lunchtime they decided to give me a third and final pessary. I finally began to have painful contractions – however they were sporadic and not frequent enough for active labour to begin.
I had now been in hospital for nearly 24 hours, confined in the tiny bay with my husband, who was doing his best to keep me calm. I was desperate to go outside and persuaded them to let me go on a short walk in my nightie into the park opposite the hospital. It was a relief to have the sun on my face and get some fresh air.
I was convinced my daughter was finally on her way, so I was devastated at the evening round to hear another midwife say I had only reached a 2cm dilation of my cervix.
Finally, at 12.40am the medical team insisted on the ‘artificial rupture of membranes’. I didn’t know what this opaque medical terminology meant and the midwife explained that they would manually break my water. She inserted into my vagina a small instrument with a hook on the end to make a hole in the amniotic sac, which released the fluid surrounding my baby. It gushed out all over the table.
The whole process was becoming a nightmare and I was losing touch with reality from the pain and exhaustion. It was now the middle of the night again and I had been awake for two days. At 3am I finally started to develop contractions every ten minutes but I was still not in active labour.
I didn’t think I could take much more. I felt like an animal trapped in an abattoir.
My agony and exhaustion increased, and time began to blur so much that I barely noticed that it was now 5am and time for another dreaded vaginal examination.
I was told witheringly that, after so many hours in labour, induction had failed and I was still only 2cm dilated. The midwife told me I would now be pumped full of hormones with an oxytocin drip to increase contractions and make them more frequent.
Knowing that I would now have to have an IV line with a cannula put into the vein in my hand filled me with absolute terror. I was so agitated that I couldn’t bear to watch. I began to shake from head to toe and sob.
The medical staff increased the dosage almost every 30 minutes to force my contractions to increase. I began to dissociate from my body and it felt as if I was watching myself from above, writhing in pain.
The morning shift arrived at 8am and I was handed over to more new staff that I didn’t know. The midwives who checked on me berated me for ‘failing to progress’.
I could not take much more; my body and mind were nearly at breaking point. It was now Saturday morning and I had been induced since Thursday afternoon. I also needed rest, so I agreed to an epidural now that I was struggling with the pain.
They handed me a leaflet on the risks of the procedure, which I was in no fit state to read. My signature slid off the page as I tried to focus on writing my name.
Then they slowly inserted the long needle. Lying on my side with my huge belly protruding off the bed and trying to hide the hand that was hooked up to the IV, I was on the verge of hysterics.
Henry was shattered too and dozed off on the hard floor, sleeping next to me on a mat with a blanket and pillow brought from home. So far, everything during labour had been the opposite of what I had expected. I had wanted a water birth in the midwife-led unit but I was now being told that my daughter was close to coming out via an emergency caesarean as my body had ‘failed’ me.
I was required to undergo yet another vaginal examination but this time the midwife’s tone was different, more urgent and animated. It was 12.50pm and I was finally fully dilated. I struggled to hear what they were saying due to the acute pain. My contractions were now four in ten minutes and I had strong urges to push. An hour disappeared. I could barely hear the midwife tell me that my baby’s head was now visible.
I felt my daughter’s skull push my cervix open and without any conscious thought or shame, I emptied my bladder and bowels. It was raw and elemental. I felt her head thrust out of me. I could still feel the contractions pulse through me and hear the midwife urgently tell me to push.
I gritted my teeth and let out a guttural scream as I pushed my daughter out completely and felt her little body rip through me and out into the world.
I shook uncontrollably, with chapped lips and matted hair. Tears ran down my face as they took her away to wash off the blood and ringed her foot like a bird with a tag labelled ‘Baby Clarke’.
They handed her to me and for a few minutes I held her, feeling broken but completely elated.
I had no idea that the real nightmare was just about to begin.
Adapted from Breaking The Taboo by Theo Clarke (Biteback Publishing, £20), to be published May 13. © Theo Clarke 2025. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 10/05/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.