One of the side affects of being an ‘expectant father’ that I’ve noticed is that I’ve started noticing babies. Whether they’re with their mothers in the street, on TV adverts or in Newspapers; I clock them. It’s just like the new car syndrome; you don’t notice how many of a particular car there is on the roads until you buy one. Then every other driver seems to have one. Well when your partner is pregnant, you cant help but notice babies. And literally every other woman does have a baby.

Anyway, in yesterday’s Sunday Times there was an article that 4 months ago I wouldn’t have noticed, but yesterday I did. The article in short was about a condition called Vasa Praevia - which:

“[Vasa Praevia] Occurs when blood vessels from the placenta or umbilical cord block a baby’s exit from the womb. When this occurs and the mother’s waters break, the blood vessels rupture and the baby loses large amounts of blood, typically causing its death.”

This affects about 1 in every 2500 babies which means between 350 and 400 are at risk of death during their birth; if the condition goes untreated.

The scandal in the article is that hospitals can provide a relatively easy to perform and unobtrusive test to see whether a baby is at risk. However, hospitals are not providing those test because the care for mothers found to have Vasa Praevia is long and expensive.

As a father-to-be, I have mixed feelings about this case. Stories about “dead babies” are guaranteed to be emotive stuff, and how it must feel to go full term only for the baby to die during birth is something that I can’t possible imagine. But I get the feeling that this is another case where we take treatment on the NHS for granted, that care will be forth coming, because we pay for it through our NI contributions. Well, yes we do pay for the NHS but PCT’s and Trusts dont have bottomless pits of cash to treat patients. They have to make decisions as to what they spend their money on and it would be particularly patronising to think that NHS managers don’t understand the consequences of their choices. You can be sure that regardless of the choices they make, they’re going to make some people happy and some people angry.

I obviously hope that Mrs C and our baby are fine during their pregnancy, and I’d undoubtedly be devastated if anything went wrong. But I’d feel that way if Mrs C or Junior had another, possibly more common illness, that couldn’t be treated because there weren’t any funds available for the provision of care.