The birth
of
distrust
The Birth of Distrust
How maternity experiences are reshaping women’s trust in the NHS, government and healthcare.
Birth is one of the most significant moments of care that the state provides. It is a moment of profound vulnerability.
For many women, it is the most intense and consequential interaction they will ever have with the NHS: a time when they are responsible not only for their own lives, but for the life and future of their child.
It is a moment when care should be at its most attentive, and the state at its most compassionate.
Yet for thousands of women across the country, that first encounter with the health system is not a moment of safety and care, but one of trauma, neglect, or dismissal.
And those experiences don’t end when they leave the hospital.
What happens at the point of birth ripples outward: into health-seeking behaviour, into trust in institutions, into decisions about future children, and even into politics.
This matters because women are often the “gatekeepers” of their family’s health, managing appointments, vaccinations, and everyday contact with the state.
Their relationship with the NHS doesn’t start at birth, but birth is the moment it becomes most critical. But when their first encounter with the NHS as mothers is poor, the damage can be lasting, not just to them, but to the wider fabric of public trust.
And crucially, mothers blame ministers, not midwives. Their anger isn’t directed at the frontline staff who delivered their care, but at the politicians who set the priorities, cut the budgets, and left services stretched to breaking point.
This report presents the first nationally representative dataset to directly link women’s birth experiences to their trust in the NHS and the Government. It shows that failures in maternity care have political consequences, eroding trust in the NHS and the Government far beyond the moment of birth.
For years, headlines have focused on catastrophic failures at individual NHS trusts. Each story is horrific in its own right. But the evidence presented here illustrates that these scandals are not outliers. The problems are not confined to a few ‘bad apple’ hospitals. They are systemic, widespread, and affecting hundreds of thousands of women across the country every single year. And as Wes Streeting, the Labour Health Secretary himself has said, maternity care should be the litmus test by which this government is judged.
We already knew that maternity care in Britain was in crisis. What we didn't know, until now, was the full scale of what that crisis is doing to women, to families, and to public trust.
When a woman leaves the maternity system afraid of hospitals, less likely to want another child, and convinced that no one in power is listening, that is a political failure with consequences that ripple outwards for years. The inequality in these findings is particularly damning.
If we are serious about rebuilding trust in public services, this is where we have to start.
Every 4 minutes
a mother’s trust in the NHS is broken
Every 6 minutes
a mother leaves maternity care more afraid of healthcare
1 in 4 women
say birth has put them off having more children
Key Findings
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75% of women with a poor birth experience say it reduced their trust in the NHS
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58% say it reduced their trust in Government
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48% say they are more anxious about returning to healthcare settings
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2 in 5 report lasting physical or mental health impacts
