Birth Budgets For Pregnant Women in England Ignite Debates

National Health Service birth budgets pregnant women prospective mothers maternity care

By Junrell , Parent Herald Mar 02, 08:23 pm

The National Health Service in England is set to roll out 'birth budgets' wherein pregnant women will be given a £3,000 budget to manage their care. Some women considered the move "comforting" while others thought it is a disaster waiting to happen.

According to a report of BBC News, the latest government scheme is part of the shake-up in maternity care that intends to give prospective mothers "more clout and more opportunity to exercise the choices that they want." With this, women will be able to freely use the amount to cover up expenses from one-to-one midwifery care to home births.

But not all women are happy about the move which is expected to pilot later this year. Emma Corlett, a 40-year-old mental health nurse in Norfolk, is staunchly against the idea because she said she knew how NHS budgets work and the allocated money might just end up "being spent on administration rather than direct care."

"It just doesn't seem [to be] anything other than a means of taking more money away from frontline services," Corlett told the Telegraph. She reasoned out that the new scheme appeared to be the same as those she was given some 10 years ago.

"It shouldn't be down to individual women to start looking into risk ratings for hospitals and deciding where they're going to go, because that relies on women who are better informed or better educated to get the best out of that," Corlett opined. "To me, that feels like a different way of bringing in a two-tier health system."

On the other hand, Natalie Pinkham, a 37-year-old mother who is expecting her second son, is amenable to the new scheme. "If empowering women by putting them in charge of their own budget helps them to take control of their child's birth, that's got to be a good thing," she stated.

Pinkham said that the budget would encourage women to learn options and take ownership of their pregnancy arrangements. "Taking control isn't going to rule out any of this happening again, but it certainly is of some comfort," she disclosed.