Trigger warning: This article features descriptions of traumatic birth and postpartum PTSD.
“I feel a tiny bit emotional.” Louise Thompson is greeting me warmly from the other end of a Zoom call. The petition she began alongside ex-Tory MP Theo Clark, calling for the implementation of a Maternity Commissioner, has just reached 90,000 signatures. “It could even reach 100,000 signatures by the end of the day, which just feels really fulfilling.” (As of 29 January, over 120,000 people have signed).
A Made in Chelsea star-turned fitness author, Louise seems somewhat surprised to find herself suddenly stepping into the role of political campaigner. “But here I am.” And she is all enthusiasm for the project. Before I can get a question in, she’s off, energetically sharing statistics along with a more hopeful vision for the future of maternity care in the UK.
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This energy and hope all stem from her own harrowing personal birth experience four years ago. “It is turning pain into purpose,” she says of her campaign. “And I think it's such a human instinct when we go through something that's really hard to look for answers. If I can't find the answers for what happened to me, [I can] help provide other women with answers and look at the actual system as a whole – then I can start to understand why.”
It’s certainly an admirable mindset considering just how horrifying her story really is. Four years ago, Louise gave birth to her son, Leo. What she had expected to be the happiest day of her life quickly turned into a nightmare. Louise was given an emergency C-section – the operation almost killed her and left her in need of numerous other surgeries, along with debilitating PTSD.
“It was just torture, to be honest. I genuinely didn't think I was going to make it,” she says, steeling herself to tell the story once again. During her C-section, she lost “a lot of blood,” she says. "I was awake for over three hours.”
The trauma of those three hours seems to be almost indescribable – and, Louise notes, still triggering. “When you're lying there seeing all of this blood everywhere, it's very scary,” she says. “I can't think of many things that are more petrifying to the human experience than believing that you're watching yourself die.”
She survived the operation, and her baby, Leo, was born. She was discharged. However, 10 days later, she had a major haemorrhage.
“I lost a lot, a lot of blood very quickly. Like a lot.” She was rushed to the emergency room, and, only because she lived so close to the hospital, she survived.
The physical complications continued. She was diagnosed with Asherman’s Syndrome, where scar tissue forms, causing the walls of the uterus to stick together. Her inflammatory bowel disease was amplified; in 2024, she had her colon removed and was fitted with a stoma bag.
But the aftershocks weren’t merely physical. “I didn’t know how to live my life,” she recalls. After her near-death experience, her PTSD manifested in panic, fear and obsessive, intrusive thoughts. “All I could think about was tracking my blood pressure, haemoglobin, and temperature. It just completely consumed me.
“When I came home, I had no intention of looking after someone else. I didn't have a relationship with my son.” She struggled to even recognise her partner, Ryan or her dogs. “He would be there, but he wasn't a person I cared about,” she says. “I was living in a bubble, where other people didn't really exist. I was very, very mentally unwell.”
The PTSD is more manageable now, but the triggers remain: “A siren going past, even a change in the temperature, or my body, just knowing it’s the date when a traumatic incident happened.”
“I can get really intrusive thoughts that just go round and round. I believe that I'm dying in those moments – the amount that I've spent on appointments, scans, and even box testing kits at home,” she says. “You can never unlearn the feeling of how scared you were.”
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Luckily, Louise has “come out the other side feeling like a normal human with a brain that works and a body that works and a good relationship with my child who's alive, and with my partner who I'm still with.” Many are not so lucky.
But wait, you may be thinking. How did we end up here? Where surviving childbirth is a matter of luck?
The statistics reflect the unequivocally dire state of the country’s maternity care: over two-thirds of NHS maternal services were deemed inadequate or requiring improvement by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2024. Despite the previous Tory government’s promise to halve the number of maternal mortality cases, it rose by 20% between the 2009-2011 period and the 2022-2024 period with 252 women dying from direct or indirect causes during or shortly after pregnancy in the 2022-24 period. Thirty thousand women develop PTSD every year after childbirth. The NHS has now reached £27 billion in liabilities for medical negligence for maternity failings – “which is more than they spend on the actual maternity care,” Thompson says.
“It's because of a fragmented healthcare system,” she says after passionately rattling off some of these staggering statistics herself. “I think now is really the tipping point where some change needs to be actioned and people need to be held accountable and really there just needs to be a unified system. A maternity commissioner is the first step in being able to implement the recommendations that have been made by inquiries for the last decade.”
Louise began to understand the systemic nature of the problem once she began sharing her story. Hundreds, if not thousands, of stories began flooding into her inbox – often from people who have never opened up about their own trauma. “I've had a lot of my mum's friends from one generation above comment under my stuff on Instagram,” she says. “I think there are a lot of people who are still holding on to some unresolved trauma.”
The more Louise has begun to be able to look outward beyond her personal experience, the more inspired she has become to call for change.
“The maternity space is not receiving the attention that it deserves,” she says. “Having received care in the gastro department or other departments, things have run more smoothly, and that doesn't sit very well with me.”
A Maternity Commissioner would be the first step in making maternity care a priority. “At the core of it, there is just a need for one person that really, really cares, who can keep landing this topic at the top of whoever's desk it is that needs to be making the important decisions.”
Countless recommendations have already been made by inquiries into the state of the NHS’s maternity care. When I ask Louise what she wants to see change, she can’t get her words out fast enough.
First, she caveats, it’s about looking at the system as a whole rather than placing the blame on any of the caregivers. “Midwives are amazing, but we're 2,500 short. It's not their fault that they're burnt out, crying in cupboards, or leaving. So, recruiting more midwives and also retaining them – just treating them better.”
She also wants to see everyone in the system following “one set of standards; one policy.”
Then there’s education. After all, few first-time parents would imagine the horrors Thompson and her partner endured. Louise had trusted the system. “I lived close to a good hospital,” she says. “I trusted the process.”
Now, Louise believes that giving future parents information is vital. “Friends and family are not always willing to share their experiences because they don't want to fear-monger. And I completely get that. I haven't wanted to scare anybody,” she says. “But there are hundreds of thousands of people who are affected. And I think educating women before they go in and experience their first birth, giving them all of the information, would be really helpful. And then also listening to women as well throughout the process. Because I think instinctively, we really do know our bodies.”
Louise is also eager for a commissioner to address the inequality of care across the NHS. “I'm lucky that I had a partner. If I were a single parent, I would have had to have somebody step in to help,” she says of her privilege.
But maternity care can be something of a postcode lottery. “People who live in certain areas don't have access to the same quality of care as other people,” she says. “Black women are three times more likely to die than white women. And that's unacceptable. So, there has to be a lot of work and money channelled into sorting that horrendous statistic out.”
And she has more ideas. Support for partners. Groups for mothers dealing with mental health problems. An improvement in the OASI bundle, which is meant to prevent women from third and fourth-degree tears… Here, she catches her breath.
Ultimately, she says, it’s about creating a system that offers the basic care we all deserve. “Every woman deserves a safe and dignified birth, regardless of their financial circumstances, where they live, what they look like or what their age is.”
Sign the petition here.
Follow Louise Thompson's campaign on Instagram.
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