‘Let’s force the change’
Today is crucial for women’s health - it’s our last day to pressure the Government to appoint a maternity commissioner, and former MP Theo Clarke is leading the charge.
TRIGGER WARNING: This episode contains some difficult conversations, including discussions around birth trauma. Please do take care of yourself while reading, watching and listening, and know that it’s completely okay to step away and come back when you’re ready.
When she gave birth to her daughter in 2022, Former MP Theo Clarke became the 56th MP in British history to have a baby whilst elected - which, in her own words, “in 1000 years, is not a great stat…”
The adversity Theo faced as both an expectant and new mother began from her emotional positive test in toilets in Parliament, and evolved throughout a pregnancy and recovery that spanned the change of three Governments and the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
“If you were picking a moment in British history in the last hundred years, it was about the worst time, I think, to have a baby,” Theo tells Gi in this week’s episode of Happy Mum.
Having battled the challenging formal systems and protocols constraining her role and dictating when she could leave her place of work to attend appointments, Theo was drafting and publishing her resignation from Boris Johnson’s Government while while to see the consultant in an A&E maternity assessment unit following a final trimester scan.
Theo didn’t have an emergency caesarean that day, and eventually went over her due date and had to be induced. Like many new mums, she was aiming for a natural water birth - a goal that was all-the-more crucial given her “massive phobia of blood and needles”...
After a 40 hour labour, third degree tear and major hemorrhage, Theo was rushed away from her new baby daughter and into emergency surgery, where she was told that because of the epidural and the levels of pain relief she had received, she would have to be awake on the operating table.
“After everything I have with the blood phobia, for me to be awake in surgery for over two hours thinking I was going to die was the most horrific experience of my life,” she says. Throughout the ordeal, Theo was supported by her husband, on her insistence.
“He said there was one moment where basically the doctors looked at each other, and he thought I was going to die and he was going to be a single dad…” she explains. “I’d only met my daughter for the briefest of moments, and I really thought I was never going to see her again.”
Thankfully, Theo was reunited with her daughter some hours later, by which time the effects of this physical trauma and blood loss meant that she was unable to fulfil her wish to breastfeed her baby.
“I literally felt on that first day that I just failed on every front,” Theo recalls. “I’d failed to breastfeed. I’d failed to be able to hold my daughter and do skin-to-skin. I couldn’t even pick her up to feed her. I literally had to be carried to the loo by my husband and kind of hosed down after the birth, and I was basically incapacitated as a parent. And I found that incredibly difficult. To hear her next to me crying in distress, and I couldn’t move, was a really horrific experience.”
An experience which sadly, was far from over.
“I remember pressing the buzzer in the hospital for someone to come and help. And this NHS professional came in when I was on my own, having just come out of theater, and she just looked at me and said, ‘Not my baby, not my problem.’ And she just walked out and left me there...”
One week later, Theo had to release a public statement to say she had given birth, and her trauma was exacerbated by the abuse she received from constituents demanding she immediately came back to work to address ongoing issues.
She was able to vote by proxy for six months following her baby’s arrival, but there is no procedure to replace MPs in person when urgent situations arise.
So when her Majesty the Queen passed away just a few weeks after her birth, Theo was driven to Parliament and back by her mum to swear allegiance to King Charles in a special ceremony for the incoming monarch. It was a monumental moment in history for which she had to be present, but during which she was battling her birth injury and incontinence throughout.
It wasn’t until she reached out to the Birth Trauma Association and welcomed a group of mums to meet with her in Parliament that Theo experienced a “turning point” in her recovery.
“At the time, I knew nothing about NHS policy,” she recalls. “I hadn’t spoken about it to anyone, and that moment was so important for me because I’d actually never met any other mums who’d had a really similar experience… I just burst into tears listening to their stories… I was really shocked. No one was listening to them.”
This “cathartic” experience was also key to Theo’s recovery, her advocacy for charities like the Birth Trauma Association, and the start of her campaign.
“I just thought, ‘Hold on a minute. All these things are going wrong, and these mums need extra help, and who’s actually giving it to them?’ And off the back of that, I ended up leading the first debate in British history on birth trauma.”
In January 2024, Theo launched the Birth Trauma Inquiry, calling for evidence in a country with no maternity strategy, and crucially, the appointment of “an independent expert whose job it is to be the maternity commissioner to actually drive outcomes... every time the government changes.”
“I was a politician, I had a platform, and I could try and change it,” Theo says. “And I felt it was really important to share my story, but also it was very vulnerable for me to do that in front of all my colleagues, and it was a really difficult moment for me to share that.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak accepted the headline recommendation, but one week later they called a general election.
“I was really hopeful that the Government, when they came in, would just accept the previous recommendations, which were cross-party… and they didn’t,” Theo says. “It just showed me yet again that maternity care is just not prioritized by policymakers.”
Today, Theo and fellow campaigner Louise Thompson have just celebrated a Government announcement agreeing to appoint a Maternity Commissioner alongside a National Maternity Strategy, to ensure mums and their babies are safe and looked after with professionalism and compassion.
Crucially however, our leadership is in transition yet again, and they are now calling on the Government to urgently make this appointment.
“So today’s the last day you can sign the petition, and please just keep signing it and keep writing to your MP because you’ve got to put pressure on the government,” Theo says.
“We’ve had enough. We want investment in women’s health. We want it to be prioritized as policy, and we want to improve standards in maternity care so that no mum does have a traumatic birth and doesn’t have access to help and resources.”
Listen to Theo Clarke’s story in this week’s episode of Happy Mum from Tuesday - wherever you get your podcasts.
Watch the episode in full on YouTube