Five years ago, when I was eight months pregnant with my first child, I – like thousands of other expectant mothers across the country – watched Channel 4’s One Born Every Minute, hoping to demystify the inner workings of Britain’s labour wards.
And it was, in the main, reassuring. The midwives all seemed to radiate warmth and compassion, and revel in their shared vocation. Of course, there were difficult storylines, too: premature babies in the intensive care unit, a single teen mum who hadn’t realised she was pregnant.
But the central thesis was that the midwives, nurses and doctors would support you every step of the way, regardless of the challenging, heartbreaking situation you might find yourself in.
Last week, a new series of the Bafta-winning documentary series was announced. But a lot has changed in the eight years since it has been on our screens – namely, a stream of damning public inquiries and investigations which have exposed a nationwide maternity scandal on an unprecedented scale.
Hundreds of preventable baby deaths, mothers left with irreversible physical and psychological damage, allegations of systemic racism, ‘normal birth’ ideology, negligent midwife care and a cover-up culture that has become entrenched in innumerable NHS trusts.
It’s hardly surprising that Channel 4’s decision to revive the heartwarming docuseries, which drew five million viewers at its peak, has been branded ‘damaging’ and ‘disgusting’ by maternity reform campaigners and bereaved mothers, some of whom are calling on the channel to scrap it entirely.
While some have described the timing of the reboot as ‘tone deaf’, others believe it could hold back their ongoing campaign to drive reform and increase accountability owing to its relentlessly positive portrayal of midwives and maternity units.
Chief among them is Fiona Winser-Ramm. She chose to give birth to her daughter, Aliona, in 2020 at Leeds General Infirmary, where the third and fourth series of the show was filmed.
She and her husband Daniel ‘referenced the fact that it had been on One Born Every Minute for two series’ and, alongside the hospital’s positive Care Quality Commission rating, had ‘no doubts’ that the care that they were to receive would be ‘good’.
‘How wrong I was,’ she tells me now. Aliona died at the maternity unit at just 27 minutes old, with a coroner ruling it had been because of ‘midwife neglect’ and ‘a number of gross failures of the most basic nature’.
After Fiona went into labour at 41 weeks, midwives failed – despite several opportunities – to assess and admit her when she reported reduced movements and a possible rupturing of her waters.
Midwives then knowingly delayed escalating Aliona’s condition to doctors, and falsified Fiona’s medical records to state wrongly that she and her husband had been informed about concerns. After being subjected to a prolonged 72-hour labour, Aliona was born in such a ‘poor condition’ that her ‘injuries proved unsurvivable’.
Fiona is today part of a group of families who have led a campaign to expose Leeds maternity services, resulting in a government-commissioned independent inquiry led by senior midwife Donna Ockenden, fresh from her damning review of maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, is also now one of 14 individual trusts being investigated as part of the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation, which is being overseen by Baroness Amos.
Little wonder that campaigners like Fiona argue that One Born Every Minute effectively airbrushes anything which does not fit the remit of heartwarming entertainment – something which, she adds, could be extremely harmful to expectant mothers.
‘I would actually argue that it could cause significant harm in portraying the view that everyone receives outstanding care,’ she says.
The upbeat series is ‘essentially misleading the viewing audience that they can trust everything that they are told and that they have nothing to worry about’.
The reality, she says, is that ’65 per cent of maternity services nationally are inadequate along with many families being on the receiving end of racism and cultural failings’ – it is not, as many believe, simply down to ‘staffing issues’.
Angela Welsh was also bereaved at Leeds while the filming of the third series of One Born Every Minute was taking place there in 2011.
After her placenta shut down at full term, she went into the labour ward to be told her son Kion had tragically died. The midwives told her to go home and come back days later, when she was ‘forced’ to give birth to him normally, and was denied a C-section.
‘I was put on the labour ward where other mums were having babies. I was treated awfully with no compassion or empathy. I was sent home with a leaflet and no counselling,’ she tells me.
She was forced to sit with other women and their babies, while one midwife asked her if she wanted to put her baby boy ‘in the fridge’. Another told her she couldn’t stop cleaners going into her baby’s room, against her wishes.
It was this midwife, Angela says, who she saw take to the stage as part of the group collecting the series’ Bafta award just a few months later, while she was ‘sitting at home crying’.
‘One Born Every Minute is not a true portrayal of what happens on the maternity wards, it is staged and they only show what they want to,’ she says.
‘I think it’s disgusting that they are doing the show at this time in particular when a public inquiry is going on.’
Angela has described the decision to revive the show as a ‘kick in the teeth to us mums’, and has called on producers to instead do ‘a documentary about the massive baby death scandals’.
Problems on maternity wards are not restricted to Leeds. Donna Ockenden is also carrying out a review of services in Nottingham, and last week she was confirmed to lead an inquiry into maternity services in Sussex after campaign group Truth For Our Babies lobbied Health Secretary Wes Streeting to appoint her.
And across the UK, it was revealed earlier this month that maternal deaths are at a 20-year high, despite the falling birth rate, while midwifery training is set to be overhauled to deal with a ‘national emergency’ as it emerged that black women are three times more likely to die during childbirth.
Meanwhile, the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation published its scathing interim report in February with the full report due later this spring.
In a statement, Baroness Amos said it was ‘clear from the meetings and conversations I have had with hundreds of women, families and staff members across the country, that maternity and neonatal services in England are failing too many women, babies, families and staff’.
Her six-point report highlighted ‘structural racism’, as well as ‘poor relationships’ between staff members and ‘a lack of compassion and transparency when baby loss and harm occurs’.
It was less than three weeks after the call for evidence came to a close that the return of One Born Every Minute was announced, which will film at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Manchester.
One source has claimed that senior staff on the ground at Saint Mary’s are already trying to control how the unit is portrayed before the cameras have started rolling.
All staff and students were informed that filming was to take place via an email, which allowed them to opt in or out of taking part.
But Band Seven coordinators – some of the most senior midwives on the unit – have tried to ‘dissuade’ and even ‘bully’ the junior or newly-trained Band Five members of the team from appearing, my source claims.
A representative for the trust has categorically denied that this is the case and insists staff of any level are able to take part. They insist no staff have made any complaints to them.
There is also concern over the fact that an inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2023 found that the maternity unit needed to improve in a number of areas, including its lack of ‘sufficiently skilled and experienced midwifery and medical staff’.
Kimberley Salmon-Jamieson, Chief Nursing Officer at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, said its maternity team had ‘worked incredibly hard’ since then to improve quality of care and that the CQC would be welcome to come back ‘so that we can demonstrate the difference we have made for women and families’.
Filming has not yet started at the unit and there is no confirmed date of transmission.
‘Keeping these harsh realities away from expectant mothers, shielding them from what could and often does go wrong is ‘insulting to every woman,’ Fiona argues.
Doing so, she says, is ‘suggesting that they are fragile, unintelligent beings who cannot handle the truth’.
She adds: ‘You won’t ever meet a bereaved family who doesn’t wish they hadn’t known more information that could have helped to safeguard them.’
In its announcement, Vivienne Molokwu, Senior Commissioning Editor, Reality & Entertainment and Commissioning Lead for E4, said she felt ‘very privileged to once again follow the journey that parents embark on as they welcome their babies to the world’.
She added: ‘We know the roller coaster of emotions that this period brings is something that will really resonate with the E4 audience, and we cannot wait for our viewers to see how the digital age has reshaped how families navigate this stage of life.’
Will Rowson, of the show’s production company Dragonfly TV, said it was an ‘exciting moment to reimagine the show’ as ‘in the years it’s been away, so much around pregnancy and maternity care has changed’.
It is hard for campaigners and bereaved parents to share their enthusiasm.
One bereaved mother wrote on X: ‘This is honestly so grim against the backdrop of the state of maternity services in this country. Channel 4 basically saying, avoidable harm & death on a massive scale? Don’t look at that, watch our fluffy TV show instead & pretend everything’s fine.’
Another posted: ‘Unless they change the name to ‘One born every minute, one killed every 10 hours 57 minutes by horrific care’ then I’m not sure what this show is hoping to achieve in this maternity crisis other than whitewashing the reality.’
One campaign group, Families Failed By OUH Maternity Services, which is calling for an independent inquiry at Oxford University Hospitals, has called on Channel 4 to ‘engage meaningfully with affected families, birth trauma charities and patient safety campaigners, and to ensure the series reflects the full reality of NHS maternity care in 2026, including its very serious failures’.
A spokesman said the announcement is ‘deeply troubling in its timing and its apparent lack of contextual awareness’ and ‘sends a deeply confused message to the thousands of families who are still waiting for accountability’.
Fiona is dismayed about the recommission because, whatever changes they make, it will ‘still feed into the narrative that all clinicians are heroes who are trying their hardest and, unfortunately, that just isn’t true’.
It just won’t be possible ‘to show the reality of the situation with a programme that is totally one-sided and controlled such as this’, she says, as the hospital would ‘never consent for anything deemed negligent to be aired’.
In a statement, Channel 4 said: ‘We are very aware of the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation which has been carefully covered by Channel 4 News. Further, Channel 4 News, jointly with the New Statesman, has concurrently conducted its own maternity investigation into Oxford University Hospitals maternity services.
‘Viewers will remember One Born Every Minute as an observational documentary series following the deeply personal and often complex birth stories of patients. It is not an investigation into maternity care provision across the UK.
‘Filming of this series is yet to begin and Channel 4 retains editorial control of the final programmes.’
