Woman's Hour - 15/05/2025

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

The programme that offers a female perspective on the world

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The Dear Daughter podcast received some fantastic letters from our listeners recently. I just had a lot of emotion and I had to put it somewhere. Together, we're creating a handbook to life for our children. Feelings that you don't know how to express verbally, write it down. Enjoy the life you have. No one can tell you what tomorrow will bring. Dear daughter from the BBC World Service, listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Just to say that for

rights reasons, the music in the original radio broadcast has been removed for this podcast. Good morning, welcome to the programme. Rose Ailing Ellis is in a new ITV drama, Code of Silence, where she begins to help in a police case by lip-reading. She'll be joining us along with the writer Catherine Malton, whose real-life experience this is based on. Former Conservative MP Theo Clark, you may remember, joined us on Woman's Hour to talk about her traumatic birth experience a couple of years ago. She went on to set up the All-Party Parliamentary Group on birth trauma and co-chaired the Birth Trauma Inquiry, where Leo has now written a book about her experience and reveals how hard

it was to go through her labour but also navigate her career as an MP at the same time. And we have a huge star joining us, particularly if you're into organ music. Anna Lapwood isn't just any organ player. I can exclusively reveal that today she's been announced as the first official organ player at the Royal Albert Hall and gets to have the 9,999 pipe organ all to herself. And she's not the only one of our guests to be the first to do something. Rose Ailing Ellis was the first deaf contestant on Strictly and she was so incredible she won it as if any of us have forgotten it was breathtaking.

So this morning I would like to hear your stories of being the first to do something and what comes with being a trailblazer. Were you the first to go to university? The first to move away from where you grew up? The first to take up a sport only your male relatives do? The first not to have children? The first woman of colour to present woman's hour. Feels good. And what comes with being the first? The trailblazer, the pioneer. Did you change the game for other women around you?

Or maybe being a pioneer is just too much pressure and you're happy just doing it for yourself. Were you the first? Are you the first? Get in touch in the usual way. The text number is 84844. You can email the programme by going to our website and the WhatsApp number is 03 700 100 444. And if you don't do so already, follow us on social media. We are at BBC Woman's Hour. That text number again, if you were the first, 84844.

But first, as you may well have heard in the headlines this morning, the police have been searching for the parents of three newborn babies, all siblings and all abandoned in East London, minutes after their birth in similar circumstances. The third was baby Elsa, left in a carrier bag near a footpath in Newham on the 18th of January 2024. She was discovered by a dog walker. Subsequent DNA tests showed she was the sibling of two other babies, a boy Harry and a girl Roman, each found in 2017 and 2019. Despite police appeals, the

parents of the three babies have still not yet been identified. Officers are now going door to door, focusing on about 400 nearby houses. To explain more about the investigation, I'm joined by Metropolitan Police Detective Superintendent Lewis Baysford. Good morning. Welcome to Woman's Hour. Why are the police going door to door now, asking for DNA in this case? Why are the police going door to door now asking for DNA in this case? So as you said, you know, this is now the third baby that has been abandoned and we have by DNA been able to link all three babies to the same mum. What unfortunately, you know, a very strange circumstance in that we know that babies are abandoned firstly,

but that obviously in this circumstance that it's been free. But actually, what happens when you do have a number of incidents that then are linked, and obviously in this case we have three babies that have been abandoned, is that you do get to the point where we start to work around our geographical locations and start to use the information intelligence that we've managed to cover through the investigation. And the reason that we are focusing very heavily and tightly in such a tight geographical area

is because we've managed to work alongside our colleagues from the National Crime Agency, particularly around geographical profiling and behavioral elements that we believe that mum or dad may have presented in those minutes after birth to really focus on this particular area. We believe that the answers will resonate certainly between the periods of when baby number one and baby else and baby number three was found, we really believe that the answers are in that particular community based on investigation, intelligence, being able to really hopefully try to tighten down on our

CCTV inquiries. And so really that is why we're focusing so heavily on this particular geographical area. And you're going door to door asking for DNA. How unusual is this kind of measure? So the sort of tactic and sort of the DNA sort of profile that we will be doing normally would be sort of adapted to sort of what I would say is, you know, very major investigations from murder investigations where we're being very suspect specific. What I want to say about this case is that whilst the abandonments in themselves, and you refer to the dog walker finding baby Elsa, you know, could have ended up in a tragic or in a different way. You know, what we can say is obviously the babies are and all the children are doing very well

and very healthy. But we do start particularly in this inquiry with how is mum, you know, what is mum's needs, you know, what's going on? Can mums actually have the ability to reach out to the police or support and their mechanisms? And so whilst yes, the abandonments were very serious in, you serious in being left where they were, certainly our position at this moment is actually trying to understand actually, where is mum and does mum need help? Yeah, concerns for the mother in all of this, which is probably something that you thought about when you were talking about going door to door asking for DNA, it sort of sounds like a manhunt, doesn't it? Even coming on Woman's Day, I'll talk about it.

So how do you kind of balance the need of the mother alongside having to go and find out where she is without absolutely terrifying her? Exactly. And really, when we've been looking to do this, it has been very different in that normally we are very suspect driven around really high level serious crimes and this is actually a way where we believe that and actually the door to door that we are doing, you know, it was very unsure as the response from the community and the people, but actually because I think of the nature of this particular case, the community and the people. But actually, because I think of the nature of this particular case, the community and the people that we are knocking on the doors and speaking to have been very, very forthcoming

because there is a drive from everybody to understand where is mum, who is mum, but actually does mum need help from society, from us as a community ourselves. Why has it been so difficult to track the parents down? Normally, obviously, we worked traditional investigative tactics from CCTV to house to house and local intelligence. And one of the things I will reflect on here is someone will be saying, this has happened in London. London is one of the most surveilled parts of the United Kingdom in the world. And yes, it is.

But we can't, we can't get away from actually, this is, you know, very much a residential community area. And I think it's highlighted actually, that there are pockets of areas within London in itself, which don't have that high density of CCV. And actually it also asks the question, do we actually have such cohesion in our communities? Do you know who your next door neighbor is or who lives across the road? And are we being as visual as we used to around what happens in that local community?

Or do we walk by every day as we leave the house with our iPhones and earpods listening to music and not seeing what's around us? And what we try to do specifically with this particular sort of outreach now, particularly where we're so close and so driven around a certain area, is he asks those questions and just say,

look up, think back to the time when Baby Us was left and actually who may have been there that's not there now, who was there during the period of the abandonments and hopefully through that, through that community intelligence we'll be able to move forward. And what happens if and when you find the parents or parents? Will they have committed a crime? We have to be open to the fact that actually the babies were abandoned in, unfortunately at times, low temperatures, low stage. And we will have to address that at some point. But I want to be really clear that actually the starting point of my position and the

investigation team and the senior investigating officer who's leading this is very much the health, wellbeing and to really firstly to get a true understanding of why and I think if we understand the why we will be able to move forward in a proportionate manner because this is all about making sure that actually mum is safe and well that is the first primary objective. Detective Superintendent Lewis Baysford, thank you very much for joining me this morning. Now to discuss what can lie behind babies being abandoned and the potential impact on them and their mothers, I'm joined by clinical psychologist, Professor Lorraine Share, who is head of the Health Psychology Unit at University College. Good morning, Lorraine. How unusual is this case?

It's very unusual. It's probably unique in my experience. It's the confluence of new technology being able to look at DNA, which we've not had in the last 100 years. You couldn't have done this. And for one baby to be abandoned but for three that's very very high. So when you first heard about this case where did

your mind go to? I mean everybody it's one of those stories that kind of really strikes all of us. As someone who's sort of professional in this field, who've done some research, where did your mind go? So my first thoughts were that this is a mother who herself has been abandoned, abandoned by the system. We have very good systems in place for child adoption, for care, for antinatal, postnatal care. It's very straightforward, yet she wasn't availing herself of any of these. We have delays and the judicial and legal system is slow and the needs of the child and the mother are immediate and those have clashed. I was intrigued to find a door-to-door search when this is nearly two years now. I mean, I can't remember what I did in January of previous years.

So there's these conflicting lines of what's going on, and it sounds to me a little bit like just confusion. How often are babies abandoned, given what you've've just said that there is support available, the changes in attitudes that have happened within society at least here in the UK? I would imagine it happens less frequently than before. It's a rare occurrence and that's why everyone is so intrigued on it. It's rare. We try to track the actual incidents and there's a pooling lack of numbers. You know, there is documents kept through, it's a criminal offense to abandon a child,

so those records are unclear. They don't differentiate between newborn abandonment and any other form. We found the numbers somewhere around 16 per annum, but in fact it's going down and there's great fluctuation on those numbers. So it's a rare and getting even a rarer event. And talking to the detective superintendent there, he was saying that the focus is on the mother. How might the mother be affected by this press coverage that this case is getting? Well, as a psychologist psychologist it's very hard to imagine but the kind of things that would come to my mind is if she was

alienated and frightened and anxious or suffering in any way, emotional abuse, lack of confidence, fear, this would heighten it. Our data we looked at when we did a caseload evaluation, we looked at what we called babies abandoned to live or abandoned to die. So looking at place of abandonment. So if you abandon a baby, you know, in the hospital corridor, or you know, in the pharmacy, there's a sense of a place of safety, whereas a baby abandoned outdoors is less so, and outdoors in the cold, even less so. So we have lots of concerns about the mode. And what reasons and situations can lead to babies being abandoned in the first place? Well, we can speculate, but actually so few mothers come forward that we don't really know.

So there's very little information and the information we have is skewed because all we can do is interviews those ones who we find, and of course they're so rare that they're not typical. And so we just have to look at what we know from mental health and from psychology and human behavior. But it's usually not a planned act. People don't think, oh, I'll plan to do this and have great big plans. Maybe it's spontaneous.

I think it would go without saying that there's a lot of trauma and mental health around it and Probably the suffering is lifelong if somebody has abandoned the baby They will never forget it for their their life and then of course we have to think of the needs and interests of the child the mental health of the child they Suffer delays they have to get into the system In a way all the literature on adoption would be relevant to them but also disclosure. Nowadays adoptive children can search out both parents and this particular group don't have that. Many of them, we did an interview study of adults who were abandoned as babies, even as old as in their 70s, grappling for information,

looking at old news press photographs, some of them trying to find their finders. And the finders are left behind. Finders are traumatized. And many of them would like to see the baby or keep a link. And the system does not allow that and compassion might say otherwise. It's good for us to say well at the very moment someone didn't want you, a complete stranger who found you did want you. So maybe it would help but it's a complex situation and we need much more resources and much more understanding. Professor Lorraine Sher, thank you for taking the time out to speak to me this morning. The text number once again 84844. Now my next guests are two of the

women behind the groundbreaking new ITV drama Code of Silence. As you may remember actor Rose Ailing Ellis was propelled into the spotlight by her memorable and incredibly moving Silent Dance on the 2021 series of Strictly Come Dancing. And there she has stayed, raising awareness and understanding of the deaf experience ever since. Now in Code of Silence, Rose plays the lead role of Alison, a deaf caterer whose life gets a lot more exciting and dangerous when she gets drawn into a covert police operation

thanks to her exceptional lip-read? Did you have lessons? I just pick it up. And how much of a conversation can you read? Well, it depends. You know, some people are EEV. It depends on the situation. Okay, cool. Just have one moment. Is that all right? Have a seat down. Listen, all our usual tabs are tied up on other jobs. I can do it if you tell me where it is. Okay, that was impressive.

And we see the character there lip, what the police officers are saying. The drama was inspired by writer Catherine Moulton's own experience with lip reading, and sees Rose take on an executive producer role too, working with Catherine and the team behind the scenes. Delighted to say Rose and Catherine join me now. Wonderful to have you both on Woman's Hour this morning. Rose, it's great to have you back.

I have to say, I watched the episode last night, got in quite late, wanted to watch the first episode and then had to binge watch the second episode. So good. And you are brilliant in it. Since we last spoke, you've been in Doctor Who, you've made a documentary teaching sign language to people in a retirement home, you've presented some of the 2024 Paralympics coverage and now Code of Silence, your first lead role in a TV drama. Congratulations. Tell us about Alison and why you wanted to play her. Thank you. I have been quite busy lately. You have?

You're telling me, I'm like, oh my god, I need a holiday. But no, I've been loving it. I play Alison and Alison is such a great character because she won't let things go and she is lip-reading for the plea, not just because she wants to save the day, no. We're not pushing for that superhero narrative because that's not what we want to do but it's more of she's doing this for herself and she wants to prove to everyone and prove to the society that she is so much capable, much more than just working in a bar. We see the character Alison juggling jobs, one in the police station canteen, as you mentioned there, another in a bar, and people make assumptions about what she can and can't

do all the time. Does this echo your own experience? Yes, I think I had it all right up going up, right up to now. It's about how people make decisions for me, thinking they've been helpful. No one being mean or being malicious, but they're making decisions without talking to me, without asking what I need and what I want and what I can do. Making it so that I remember at my first, I remember having a job in a shop floor for the clothing. And I wanted to work on a shop floor so I can work with customers. They really liked me, it was so impressive me.

They offered me a job. I turned out and it turned out I was down in the basement packing rather than being on the shop floor with the customer. Yeah. Catherine, this drama is partly based and inspired by your own experiences with lip reading. Tell us more about that and how this project came about and how then you formed this power couple partnership with Rose. Yes, so I'm partially deaf and I taught myself to lip read as a child. And I mean, I say taught myself, it was quite an instinctive thing. I just picked it up and I didn't really know what I was doing, actually. I just knew that I felt very anxious when I couldn't see people's faces.

And it wasn't until much later that I had lip reading lessons, and then I started to understand all the work that lip readers are doing. And it's only about 40% of speech in ideal conditions that is visible on the lips, and the rest of it is complicated guesswork that you're putting together from someone's facial expression, their body language, where you are, what you know about the person. And it just occurred to me that lip readers are detectives, so it just felt perfect that there should be a crime show with a lip reader as a detective character. And so I wrote an outline for the idea.

And that was the point that we took it to Rose before I'd even written the script. And yes, thankfully she said yes. Was it a no brainer for you, Rose? And also you get to exec produce. Yeah, so when I first got the outline, I did became suspicious because normally if any mention of lip reading, they always often get it wrong with so much misconception that

I can lip read from existing, I understand every single word. But what, this was the first time I've seen something, actually it's a big puzzle, it's trying to work out, there's a lot of guessing and it's all about the body language and so much more information you can get from people and that's what we draw on to me, so I said yes. And then, but it was really nice to be involved in the project very early on for two years because quite often as an actor you come onto set and then there's something not quite right and you want to change something but it's all too last minute, it's all too chaotic, and it ends up becoming unarthroforce.

But the fact that we got it very early on, and also bringing a sex producer, I'm not doing it for a name or for a fancy title, I'm doing it as a deaf person, because you get more input, it's more likely to get deaf people in the crew, and also bringing Brian here, who's a wheelchair user, and she has such an amazing network of disabled people. So we're bringing them

all in and I think when you have the people from atop, it really does have a knock on effect to everybody and it becomes more inclusive. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because you understand it, you see it, you know it. Rose, you worked with, or Catherine, you worked with, as Rose just mentioned, a diverse crew from deaf, disabled, neurodiverse communities. How important was that?

But also, how difficult or easy was it to make that happen? I think it was easy in this situation because there was a will to do it from very early on. I knew that I wanted the show to be very inclusive and I'd known Bryony, our exec producer, for a very long time. And she's, as Rose said, she's got a very extensive network of deaf, disabled, and neurodiverse people working in TV. So she was able to bring people in. And with Rose as an executive producer, although that was very important,

but we built it that way from the ground up because the TV industry in general doesn't have a great kind great track record of inclusiveness. So how easy or difficult was it to get this idea over the line, to get it commissioned? Oh, it was very difficult. We gave it to ITV to see if I liked it and they commissioned it the next day. Brilliant. There you go. It's easier when we have it done.

Well, that's powerful, isn't it? Yes. And I think the TV industry is always looking for something different. And there is something different. Disabled people have so much stories to tell. But we're not doing it as an odd, educated, and a kind of like a peachy show about disabled people. Number one is entertainment and it's drama and it's making you want to watch the second episode. That is what we want. That is the whole point of

TV and it just happened to have a disabled leaving character in it and it has a story that makes it different. It's a new experience of watching TV and I think people, the commissioning is getting more harder, it's harder to get things commissioned. So everyone is always looking for that something different so it's exciting time and I look forward to see what it means for the future. Yeah well as part of the the program today we're asking our listeners and loads of you are getting in touch by the way I'm going to read out some of your messages in a moment about if they were the first in their family to do something because we are going to be having And the lap would on who's taught she's one of the first female organists to be announced at the Royal Albert Hall you Trailblazer yourself Rose

So how much of this is to do with you being a pioneer and changing the landscape for other people? It's your power that got this over the line. It's you that was also in the BBC, brilliant BBC thriller, Reunion. I mean, this is all firsts. Do you feel a sense that you are shifting the game, if you like? And is that a burden? Yeah. I think in the last few years, it has really happened so quickly and so sudden and there's so much stuff going on which is really exciting. I did need to build that pressure and that feeling that I must get things right and I

can't make any mistakes and things. But then I eventually told myself that pressure shouldn't be on me anyway, it should be on the society and the industry because they are the ones making the choices. I don't have that power. So once I realise that, I'm actually, actually, I'm just going to stick to what I should be doing which is enjoy acting and enjoy my job and just focus on that. Catherine, you've written lots of other TV dramas.

Had you been wary or nervous of putting a deaf character at the center of your dramas before this idea? I think it was more that I was a little bit wary of putting so much of myself into something before. So that felt, it felt like a little bit nerve wracking because it was something that I hadn't necessarily talked about. My hearing loss wasn't something I'd talked about a lot professionally before, and this was kind of having to put that out there in a bigger way, I suppose. So that

was the nervousness really. But I do think maybe because of the work that Rose has been doing it felt easier and more possible that there was an openness to, it just felt like maybe the time had come for the idea. Also, some of the techniques that you use to try and help us understand what lip reading is, very clever, because you have words coming up on the screen, but they're jumbled up and then you kind of, sort of they kind of form sentences. And also the sound design is excellent as well as we kind of possibly hear what Alison's character is hearing

and then we go into kind of what everyone else is hearing. Yeah, well we wanted to make sure that we were conveying that lip reading is actually quite hard. It's a lot of work and you don't always, it's not like reading a book. You don't get full sentences in that way, you sort of get pieces here and there, and then you sort of work out what it is. So those, those subtitles coming into focus is often the visible shapes that you see first, and then you're sort of showing Alison's internal process of working out what the rest of the sentence must be and what

had been said. The sound design was actually kind of, Rose had a huge input into that. I don't know, do you want to talk about that, Rose? Yeah, Rose, tell us about the sound design. Yeah, so we recorded it off my hearing aid and then made the sound, but it's sort of mechanical sound because everyone assumes that a hear is silent, but it's sort of mechanical sound because everyone assumes that I hear silent but it's not quiet. So I brought my hearing aid and made people record it off my hearing aid which is really fun. But the thing is, it is mechanical, what you hear, but there's a difference of hearing a sound and training your brain to understand the sound. So whatever it sounds in my head, it's more soft the sound of it. It is brilliant. I cannot wait to watch the rest of it.

Like I said, I binge watched two episodes last night, haven't had enough sleep consequently. Are you glad that you're late to watch it? I loved it. Worth it. You've got a really busy schedule. I know you're running off to do something else. Can you tell us what's coming up next? I've got to go on a live television now on this morning. She's on this morning. She's about to walk on a screen. All right.

Well, enjoy. Thank you both of you for coming on to talk to me. Rose and Katherine. Thank you. Thank you. And Code of Silence starts on ITVX this Sunday, the 18th of May. And lots of you are getting in touch, telling me about your experience of being

the first to do something. I was the first of my friends to have a baby. It was lonely and also emancipating all at once. Sue says, I'm the first woman in my family to earn a living by setting up my own business. Also the first not to have had children and maybe that has helped in some way. Preet from Birmingham says,

I was the first person in my family to go to university and to have a professional job. My dad worked in the foundry and my mum as a production operative. They gave me a lot of time to study and encouraged me a professional job. My dad worked in the foundry and my mum as a production operative. They gave me a lot of time to study and encouraged me at every turn. Now they're so proud of what I've achieved and are my favorite cheerleaders in everything I achieve.

I wouldn't be where I am today without their support. Very powerful. Trisha says, I was the first person to produce a pantomime, Cinderella, in the outer Hebrides, in the early 70s. The islanders loved it and returned for all three nights and I was the first female commercial aircraft refueler in the UK. Oh, we like that and keep them coming in eight four eight four four The dear daughter podcast received some fantastic letters from our listeners recently

I just had a lot of emotion and I had to put it somewhere. Together, we're creating a handbook to life for our children. Feelings that you don't know how to express verbally, write it down. Enjoy the life you have. No one can tell you what tomorrow will bring. Dear Daughter, from the BBC World Service. Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Now in August 2022, the then conservative MP for Stafford, Theo Clark, gave birth to a daughter.

She had a 40 hour labour and a third degree tear. She needed a two-hour operation and was in hospital for a week. She came on Woman's Hour in 2023 to give her first broadcast interview about her experience. Theo set up the all-party parliamentary group on birth trauma, co-chaired the birth trauma inquiry in Parliament and gave a moving speech in the House of Commons. On the 13th of May last year, Theo published a report, Listen to Mums, ending the postcode lottery on perinatal care. She lost her seat in 2024 election and has now written a book with a podcast of the same name, Breaking the Taboo, Why We Need to Talk

About Birth Trauma. Theo joins me now live in the studio. Welcome back to Woman's Hour. Thank you, Anita. Lovely to be back in the studio. So you've lived through it yourself. You've talked about it. You came on this program and gave us your first interview about it. You then decided to use your own skills and your power to try and change things for all pregnant women. Why then write the book? So the book is really firstly the story of my traumatic birth to try and help other women to feel less alone who've been through similar experiences. But it's also the stories of my traumatic birth to try and help other women to feel less alone who've been through similar experiences but it's also the

stories of other families who've been affected. In fact when I came on Women's Hour I was really inundated afterwards by a huge number of families who wrote to me saying that they'd had very similar experiences across the UK and when we chaired the birth trauma inquiry we were literally inundated. We had 1,300 families that gave evidence to the parliamentary inquiry that I co-chaired with Rosie Duffield MP. And so many of those families we couldn't include in the report because they didn't see the call for evidence at the time.

So I wanted to include some of their stories in the book too because they weren't heard in the parliamentary inquiry. So it's the story of the inquiry but also of my personal experience but really is also a call to the government to improve maternity care. It's what really struck me during the campaign in the last two years was how there is really a postcode lottery of maternity care in the UK and I personally don't find it acceptable that depending on where you live in the UK you will receive a different level of care.

Was it traumatic or helpful reliving it whilst writing the book? Well I found it quite upsetting to be honest, the first time when I started writing my story down. But in a way it's almost become a form of creative therapy because it's helped me to kind of process what happened to me. And I do have a number of recurring dreams and nightmares of sort of being in the operating theatre. I had a very distressing birth, you know, mentioned my 40 hour labour, but I also spent

over two hours awake on the operating theatre thinking I was going to die after I'd given birth and that was incredibly distressing experience. And unfortunately, I'm not alone. I mean, we know that around 30,000 women every year are suffering from PTSD post-birth because they've had similarly distressing experiences. So that's really what led me to campaign for change was to know that there are so many other families who've had similar experiences and really we need the government to take action to address aftercare for mums in this country. And after going through it, people will remember your moving speech in parliament which received

a round of applause. Why did you decide to go public with your about your experience? Well, I thought very long and hard about whether I should speak about it. Firstly, speaking in the Chamber of the House of Commons is an incredibly public forum and speak about something so personal was very difficult decision. But also because, you know, my daughter is only two and a half, and I'm very conscious that anything that I say and have written in the book, you know, she'll be reading about when she's older, and it's her story too. But I also thought it was incredibly important to break the taboo by speaking about it. And I think there's

a real stigma and a shame attached to issues of women's health that we just don't talk about enough. And I was very struck during the inquiry how families wrote to me where mothers had obviously given birth in the last few weeks or months, but also families who'd given birth, you know, decades ago that didn't feel like they could speak about it. And famously, when I gave that speech in Parliament, I actually burst into tears and eat it in the middle of my speech, very unexpectedly. And I think it just shows how after all that time, the trauma was still there. And I was really quite embarrassed. And I remember coming out of the chamber thinking, Oh, my goodness, I've just, you know, cried in my place of work. How embarrassing. But actually, that's really what opened the floodgates of other mums to

say, you know, I heard your story, and I've had so similar. Thank you for sharing it. Isn't that an interesting reaction for you to have? Even that is a very woman's reaction that, oh, I cried at work, how embarrassing. You've lived through this incredible trauma. And if you watch it, which I did, I rewatched it, you can see that it's still in your body. The tears are coming because it's still in you. It's very powerful. If you don't mind, could we just talk about what actually happened? Because you had this traumatic birth 48 hours I said 40 was a 40 hour labor 40 hour labor, then you were rushed into theater because he'd suffered a third degree tear Did you complain what was going on at that time? Yeah, so I had a very difficult labor firstly

My daughter was late So I ended up being induced and I think my antenatal classes had absolutely not prepared me for kind of complications or things going wrong. And I've heard that now from so many other women. I think it's really important to say that obviously what happened to me was really terrible, but a lot of mums who are listening to the show and who are pregnant now I don't want to scare them. And a lot of them will have a good experience. But I had a 40 hour labor, ended up having a vaginal delivery, bleeding very heavily afterwards and I got rushed into the emergency theatre with what I now know was a very significant

birth injury called a third degree tear. And to be honest, it was the most terrifying experience of my life. I thought I was going to die. I thought my husband was going to be a single dad. I thought I'd never see my daughter again. And you know, that trauma is still there. I'm still having to have help with both my physical and mental recovery. And it was really also what happened to me afterwards, which I found quite shocking. So I remember being in the recovery ward. And when my daughter finally was brought back

to me, I remember pressing the emergency button for help. And at this point, I couldn't pick my daughter up. I had an epidural, so my legs were paralyzed from the waist down. I had a catheter in, I had an IV that I was hooked up to. So I literally couldn't pick her up. And I pressed the button to ask for help. And this NHS professional came in and said, not my baby, not my problem. And she just walked out and left me there.

And to be frank, I have never felt so vulnerable and so alone in that moment. And that was the time that I really needed compassionate care. So that was partly what led me to start meeting other mums and to hear more about this and to discover that my experience was not unique and that other mums have had the same. And we're going to talk about that in a moment, but I must just read out a statement that we've had from the University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust. Anne-Marie Riley, who's the chief nurse said, we would like to again apologize to Theo if her experience

was not up to our expected standards. We've met with her following her birth and discussed the concerns she's raised with us. However, there are elements of care in her book, which we do not recognize from previous accounts, would urge her to discuss with us again. Delivering safe high quality care is our priority and since her experience the CQC have recognised the improvements we've made to our services, raising the rating from good to requires improvement. We remain committed to delivering the highest standards possible and would encourage any mother to raise issues about their care with us at the time so we can resolve promptly. We discuss women's health on Women's Hour all the time. In fact, just the other day we had Naga Muncheti discussing

her own experience and talking about how women need to have the ability to advocate for themselves. And when I was reading your book I thought, here we have a highly educated, privileged white couple who weren't able to successfully advocate for themselves in that situation. So what chance does anybody else have? Well, that was partly why I wrote the book, Anita, because even I didn't really understand things like my rights in childbirth. I'd spent very little time in hospital before I had my baby. So for me, it was a very new and deeply distressing experience. And partly the reason I've written the book is to raise awareness, because I do think that birth trauma is reduced if women are better educated. So

if something goes wrong that they're able to you know process that better and they know what to ask for. And that's also partly why I have my own podcast Breaking the Taboo to also speak about this because so many mums are now writing to me asking for help and I want to signpost them to where to find it. What other stories have you heard from women? Well, some really shocking examples. I mean, one mom wrote to me to say that she was, you know, bleeding on the floor and she was told by an NHS professional to clear it up. I've had fathers say that they weren't addressed to at all during the entire labor. And one

was asked to choose, you know, between saving his wife or his baby and had never been spoken to during the entire process. I've had mothers who, due to their ethnic background not having recognised that they've had a hemorrhage because of the colour of their skin, I mean, unfortunately, I've had story after story with really shocking examples of poor maternity care. And really, the headline finding in my report was that point that maternity care has unfortunately become normalised and not a standard level of care across the country. So what are your headline recommendations? So in the report we had over 40 recommendations to the Prime Minister last year,

the headline of which, which was to have a national maternity improvement strategy. And that came about because we heard so much evidence of very different examples of care and it was very clear that there is a postcode lottery on maternity care in the UK. And we thought that was the best policy way to address that. And what I find incredibly disappointing is that the previous Prime Minister accepted my recommendation. I remember standing up in the Chamber of the House of Commons and asking a question at Prime Minister's questions on behalf of all these families who'd given evidence. And it was accepted our cross-party recommendation. And unfortunately the new government has now been in power for 10 months and we have had no official statement from the Health Secretary

of whether they are going to implement these recommendations. And the book is purposefully coming out one year on from the Birth Trauma Inquiry Report being published and I'm very much calling on the government today to enact in full the cross-party recommendations of our inquiry because we know what the issues are and Donna Rockenden wrote the forwards to my book who's been leading the investigations and hospital trusts with failings in maternity and now it's about government taking action. I think the time for words has passed and now we need the families to be looked after, we need policies to be delivered that affect improvements.

So you're pushing for change based on your own traumatic experience knowing full well that other women need the system to change so that they don't have to go through what you went through and all the other women that you've spoken to. The other thing that strikes me from the book is when you talk about your own place of work and your experience of being pregnant as an MP and the lack of flexibility you had in your workplace? Well, really, it was not something I thought about before when I became an elected politician. But you're absolutely right, Anita, I don't believe that parliament is a modern workplace. I mean, to give you an example, I remember when I was pregnant and had morning sickness,

which I like to say is more like all day sickness of sort of vomiting all the time. And you know, we had crazy votes late at night on a Monday evening. I had one when I went into the WIPs office to ask permission to go home at 10 o'clock at night. And they said, no, you can't because we have to defend, you know, government legislation. And I was sent home at one o'clock in the morning as a pregnant mum vomiting heavily. So badly, in fact, I couldn't even walk through the division lobby to vote in person but I still had to be present on the estate. And I've actually put in a whole chapter about modernising parliament as I do think it impacts on our democracy because if we don't make parliament family friendly and mean that it's possible for mums like me with a newborn baby to be able to be in our place of work, that actually impacts on

the number of women that will stand for public office. And I kind of wanted to call that out in the book as well, because I found it particularly ironic that as policymakers, we create the legislation that you will follow as businesses on maternity leave. But it's actually not applicable to us as lawmakers. So I hope that parliament takes steps to be dragged into the 21st century as a workplace. And I particularly enjoyed at the beginning of the book where you fully own and state that you recognized what kind of MP you were, that you're from a new breed, a younger breed that was sort of ruffling feathers of the older guard.

Yeah, well, I remember it sort of makes me laugh now to think back. But my very first ever question that I asked in the Chamber of the House of Commons was about period property and products in schools. And I remember some of the older male MPs were literally squirming in their seats when I was talking about this. And I just thought how astonishing and I think it goes back to that point of, we do need to have more young women elected to public office. Because the fact that my debate that I led on birth trauma was the first in a thousand years of Parliament's history, I think illustrates the point very well that because I was a young mum with a baby, I did choose to talk about women's health in the chamber.

Well, you were only the 56th woman to give birth whilst an MP. Yeah, which I find is an astonishing statistic that it's still so few. I think partly Parliament wasn't set up to be built for young mums with babies. For women. For women in general. And I think that's something that needs to change. And I think I'm personally a great advocate of the 50-50 campaign. I want us to have gender parity in parliament, but that's not going to happen if they don't modernize parliament and make it a much more family-friendly workplace, which I hope that they do.

You were also pregnant during a very tumultuous time in British politics, the year 2022, the fallout from Covid, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and you supported Penny Mordant and then got phone calls from both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak asking to support you. Tell us a bit about that. So it was really an astonishing time to be having my third trimester and then giving birth. I think it illustrates very well in the book how an MP is basically never off duty. So I wrote a whole chapter about resigning in hospital because I mean what an extraordinary moment to basically be in my maternity assessment unit in Royal Stoke waiting to be seen by the obstetrician thinking my baby might be arriving anytime soon with

a emergency c-section because my daughter's heartbeat was skipping a beat. And actually what I was doing was sat dictating my letter of resignation to the Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying that I no longer had confidence in his government and submitting a vote of no confidence letter to the chair of the 1922 committee. And I think that really illustrates the point that an MP is basically never off. And I think there are a lot of things that parliament could do to change that. So I was very struck during the pandemic, that during COVID-19, they actually made a lot of changes. So we had remote voting, electronic voting, we also were able to speak in the chamber

virtually to ask questions. And I find it astonishing that those things were taken away after the pandemic and are not able to be used by mums with a newborn baby. So there were certain things that I couldn't do, like for example, asking a question at PMQs with my newborn baby. So I didn't feel like I was able to properly represent constituents during the six months that I was given a proxy vote. So MPs are really not given maternity leave in a way that any other employee in the country would, and I hope that changes. Thea Clark, thank you very much for coming in to speak to me this morning. And Thea's book, Breaking the Taboo, is out now. Thank you.

We also have a statement from the Department for Health and Social Care. Progress has been made across a number of the recommendations from the APPG on birth trauma including achieving 5.8% increase in the number of midwives and this week we've announced the rollout of a national NHS training program to reduce the number of brain injuries during childbirth. We know there is more to be done though through our plan for change we are training thousands more with midwives and have set an explicit target to close the black and Asian maternal mortality gap.

84844, the text number. Now Anna Lapwood is one of the world's most famous organists and an internet sensation with over 2 million social media followers, hailed as classical music's Taylor Swift. She's co-curating and performing in a very special BBC Proms has an album out this month and we can reveal she's just been appointed as the first ever official organist of the Royal Albert Hall. Given how busy she is perhaps it's not surprising that Anna has been included in the Sunday Times Young Powerlist for 2025. Welcome to

Woman's Hour, congratulations. Thank you for taking the time out to speak to us, Anna. What does it mean to be appointed the first ever official organist of the Royal Albert Hall? It's so surreal. I mean, I'm sitting at the Albert Hall now in my dressing room. I've got a show here tonight and I've been lucky enough to get to play this amazing organ for the last three years as an associate artist, this scheme that they set up to kind of bring in a different audience but also to give a platform to a whole load of amazing young artists and to sort of see that now growing into this more official role

going forwards that is putting the organ front and centre and celebrating this iconic instrument here at the hall. It just it feels like such a special moment and it's almost exactly three years since everything sort of first started with the Hall, so yeah it's very special. Yeah it was built over 150 years ago this particular organ and it was the biggest instrument in the world, what makes it so special? It was the biggest and I mean it's still pretty huge, it's 9999 pipes and oh gosh, it has so much sort of range. It can copy all these different orchestral instruments. It can pretend to be a percussion section.

But I think the thing I love most about it is the fact that often people come to a show at the hall and they're coming to see an artist, they're not expecting to hear the organ. They see this amazing organ facade and they sort of think, oh artist, they're not expecting to hear the organ. They see this amazing organ facade and they sort of think, oh, well, it's just for show or it's, I don't know, an ornament. And then I can sort of sneak up and suddenly surprise them with the feeling of the full organ in the middle of one of these shows.

And it just takes the sound in that room to a totally different level. And it's, yeah, been one of the loveliest things about the last three years getting to explore that. And what does that feel like for you? We get a sense of it from watching you on social media because you are so, you express your emotion but what is that feeling when you get to play it in that incredible auditorium? It honestly feels like flying. It's really hard to explain because you almost fuse

with the instrument and so it's like there isn't a sort of there's not a breaking point between your body and the instrument itself. So when it really is shaking the entire room, it feels like that is just coming from you and it's this explosion of energy and emotion that is also feeding off everyone else in the room. So, yeah, it's quite an addictive feeling. What do you want to do with this role? What does it mean? What can you do?

Well, I think the big thing for me is I'm hoping to open this instrument up to as many different people as possible, because at the moment I felt very lucky to get to play it. But it's pretty hard to get practice time here. It's pretty hard for any organists to get time here. So one of the things we're doing is introducing an organ scholarship role, which will help mentor a young organist and give them the chance to play this instrument. And with the organ scholar, we're going to be running various days to get more young people playing the organ, experimenting, getting the chance to get their hands on this one. Because I honestly think if you get to play this instrument, this particular organ, there is no way

you don't fall in love with the organ more generally. We've got to tell the story about how you actually came to the organ. You were the first woman in the 560-year history of Magdalene College, Oxford, to be awarded the organ scholarship. You grew up hearing the organ because your father's a vicar, but it wasn't your first instrument of choice. You play 15 other instruments.

Yes, we were all feeling very inadequate. How did the organ win out in the end? Well I mean I definitely didn't sort of fall in love with it straight away. I found it extremely difficult when I first started and music was my most natural form of communication at that stage and so to feel like I had a wall around this particular instrument was incredibly frustrating and I think that was the thing that kind of drove me to really want to work out how to push through that wall. And then it's actually only more recently when I've started playing film transcriptions, writing my own transcriptions and doing lots of commissioning, particularly of young female composers, I feel like I've sort

of fallen in love with the instrument on my own terms instead of on the terms of other people telling me what I should be playing. So whereas I used to really hate performing when I was just doing what I was told the whole time, now I absolutely adore performing and I feel like I've kind of reclaimed it for me and I would encourage any young musician to try and do a similar thing and find the music that really makes their heart sing, because it's a really special thing when you explore an instrument on those terms. And did I read that you went for the organ and took the scholarship because you heard that you got a grand piano in your room if you got one. So just a lovely detail. Is it true? That is in fact true. lovely detail, is it true? Give us this insight into the wild world of getting this organ scholarship at Oxford. Well it's funny, I mean so as an organ

scholar at Oxford or Cambridge you're working incredibly hard, I mean in the case of Magdalen you're playing for eight services a week so you're basically doing a full-time job on top of your degree and it's not something, I mean you get sort of a couple of hundred pounds a year, but they sort of give you other perks to say thank you. And one of those perks is in lots of colleges, they give you a nice room, they give you a grand piano to practice on. And I have to say, I was devastated I never actually got the grand piano, but I did, I got myself a little organ for the room instead, from eBay, which did the job. I was just imagining all the parties standing around this grand piano in your room. Now, for the first time since 1983, people are going to be able to be part of your night

time world as you co-create and perform and overnight at this year's BBC Proms on the 9th of August. What experience do you want to share with the audience? Tell us more. Well, I get to do all my rehearsals in the middle of the night here. We tend to practice between 11 and 7 in the morning and it's just a completely magical place. I know people probably think of the film Night at the Museum and it does feel a little bit like that in that like all the cleaners are in, all the security guys are in and we order McDonald's. We just have a

really really great time and I feel like you get to know iconic buildings in such a different way when you're here in the middle of the night. And so for a long time, we've been talking about trying to open that up to people. And I had a chat with the proms about it last year. We tried to make it happen, couldn't make it happen, and we were determined that this time around we would. So we basically want people to come not to sleep but just to experience this kind of weird space of being in this iconic building while everyone else is asleep and

Just making music together and having a bit of a party of pillows and blankets provided. I mean I'm in I'm coming along. Um, I don't know if we decided that yet And you've got a concert this evening at the Royal Albert Hall including two new commissions. How important is it? You said putting music, putting the organ front and centre, like tell us about what's happening tonight. So it's quite an exciting one, it's my first headline show here and yeah commissioning new music is a huge part of what I've been trying to do. So we've commissioned Max Richter who's written this phenomenal work, Cosmology, which is organ, orchestra and choir. And actually, my girl choristers are coming to sing as well. So the youngest person on stage tonight will be nine. And I think it's going to make me cry so much when

I hear them sing. And I'll be sort of crying while playing the organ. But then we've also commissioned Christina Arikelian, who's this amazing young composer. And she I've been working with her for four or five years now. And I just I think commissioning is so great, because it gives you the chance as an artist to shine a light on people, personalities, musicians, music that you find really, really exciting, and hope that when you throw that into the world with enough energy, other people might be excited about it too and sort of learn about Christina learn about more about Max perhaps and take that music on their journey with them. You're doing it your energy and your passion is infectious as is your

talent. Anna thank you so much for joining me next time come in come in I would love to. I know you're very busy and I would love to be in that room overnight listening to you thank you so much Anna Lapwood and Anna's BBC prom called from dark till dawn is on at the Royal Albert Hall on the 9th of August I'm going to end the program with some of your messages because so many of you have been in touch about being the first I was the first in my family to have a profoundly deaf child, now 33 years old. It's been an amazing experience. She's a qualified radiographer.

I wouldn't change it for a minute. As my daughter says, if I wasn't deaf, I wouldn't be me. Thank you, Rose, for all you're doing. Claire in Yorkshire, known as Woody by her teammates. I'm the first woman in my family to play rugby. It didn't start playing until I was 47. I'm now 54 and still going strong. Good for you. Don't join me tomorrow for more Woman's Hour. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. Hi there, I'm Izzy Judd and I'm so pleased to be back with the Music and Meditation podcast series 5. We'll be talking about everything from defining boundaries and letting go of guilt, to evolving

with change and concentrating on your own path, with an insight from a wonderful line up of special guests including Deepak Chopra, Helen Marie and Light Watkins. So if you need to find some moments of calm in your day and could do with the help of some guided meditations and beautiful classical music, we've got everything you need on the Music and Meditation podcast on BBC Sounds. Thanks.