For Hindus, cows are sacred because they are thought to be manifestations of the Mother Goddess, giving life-sustaining milk and reflecting the bounty of the earth.
If the NHS is Britain’s sacred cow, its maternity services are particularly badly suited to the role of Mother Goddess. In fact, the cloud over the NHS’s maternity services is black enough to strip them of the business. Think Moloch, not Krishna.
But how bad is the NHS’s maternity service by the standards of developed industrialized countries? The World Health Organization tracks rates of stillbirth throughout the world, so we can answer that question, at least for the years 2000-2019. For those wishing to check, you can find the data here.
In 2019, Britain’s stillbirth rate was 3.043 stillbirths per thousand. Taking a wide sample of high income/developed country rates, Britain’s is one of the worst, with its rate 1.1SDs above a sample whose mean is 2.55 and median is 2.50. We’re doing slightly better than Greece, slightly worse than Croatia.
For European countries, the UK is a far more perilous country to be born in than Denmark (2.01 per thousand), Finland (2.02), Austria (2.19), Switzerland (2.22), Spain (2.24), Netherlands (2.31), Poland (2.34), Italy (2.39) or Sweden (2.44). Almost all mainstream European countries, in fact.
Is it too much to say that Britain’s sacred cow accepts child sacrifice?
Portugal’s rate of 2.48 is the nearest representative of the median rate, at 2.48 per thousand, so perhaps we should compare Britain’s track record with that. As the chart below shows, since 2000 we’ve always had substantially higher stillbirth rates than Portugal. What it also shows is that the improvement in Britain’s rate bottomed out in 2016, since when it has been rising. This data ends in 2019, but we can take the Care Quality Commission’s word for it that things have got worse since then.
At this point, it is worth pointing out that the WHO’s estimates of the UK’s rate of stillbirth is sharply lower than that put out by the Office for National Statistics for England and Wales. Its report on maternity for 2020 puts the rate of stillbirth at 3.8 per thousand. This, they say, is a record low, with rates still falling over the long term. There must be a methodological mix, because a rate of 3.8 per thousand is 2.8 SDs above the WHO’s sample average.
But perhaps am I cherry-picking the data to provide a bleaker-than-necessary picture of the UK? That is not my intention, although I confess than my emotional response to the NHS’s maternity performance is outrage - why do we put up with it? But I confess, I did leave out one important country from the WHO’s population. I left out France, where the reported stillbirth rate is an astonishing 4.36 per thousand. This is an off-the-charts outlier in the WHO’s data suggesting either that France’s health services are positively Herodian, or that there’s a methodological issue responsible for the outlier.