Maternal Mental Health

Danny Chambers Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I commend the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith) for securing this hugely important debate and speaking so eloquently about her friend. As someone who has lost a close friend to suicide, I completely agree that they are not defined by their death, but by the impact they had during their life and the impact they had on other people.

Suicide is the leading cause of death among women in the six weeks to 12 months after giving birth, and maternal mental health in Winchester and across the UK is in crisis. As the Lib Dem spokesperson for mental health, I am hearing more and more stories about this from individual women. Every year, 600,000 women give birth, and one in five of those women will experience a perinatal mental health condition. This is a completely neglected mental health crisis, on an extremely large scale.

Polling from as recently as December 2024, commissioned by the campaign Delivering Better, representatives of which I am pleased are in the Public Gallery today, found that seven out of 10 women who have a negative birthing experience say that it has had a long-term impact on their mental health. A recurring theme is that women are not being listened to—that has been a theme in essentially every major maternity inquiry. Women are not listened to when they raise concerns pre, during and post labour, not listened to when they raise complaints with trusts about their care, and not listened to by successive Governments who have failed to treat this issue with the seriousness it demands. If this crisis is to be meaningfully addressed, far greater emphasis needs to be placed on the voices and experience of women and birthing people.

[Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way and thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith) for securing the debate. Does the hon. Member agree that, given the scale of the problem and the barriers to new parents and new mothers asking for help, it is important that this Government focus on pre-emptive support, in case people are struggling with their mental health? We should assume that having a child will affect women’s mental health, and that assumption would force the Government to take a proactive approach to supporting women in that time.

[Dr Chambers]

I completely agree with the hon. Member and thank her for her important intervention. For years, we have been calling for better community healthcare. We know the demographics who are at high risk of mental health issues: not only women who are within a year of giving birth, but a whole load of other people, such as military veterans and farmers. Those groups of people need proactive help before they reach crisis point. It is more cost-effective to treat them earlier, rather than to pick up the pieces once they are in a crisis.

The Government recently announced that they will drop women’s health targets to avoid overspending, but it is clear that women’s health, including maternity care, has been deprioritised for too long. I urge them to reconsider.