Call for Evidence: National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation

[IwantToRetire]

Baroness Amos is asking women and families across England to share their experiences of maternity and neonatal care through a public Call for Evidence. Responses to the Call for Evidence will be used to inform the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation’s findings and recommendations.

The Call for Evidence is open for 8 weeks from 20 January until 17 March 2026.

There are two Call for Evidence surveys available:

• One for women and people who have been pregnant to share their own experiences of maternity and neonatal services.
• One for other people to share their experiences supporting someone through pregnancy. This could include fathers, non-birthing partners, family members, friends, or other support people.

You must be aged 16 and over to respond. If you are under 16, you must complete the Call for Evidence with somebody who is 16 or over.

Please do not include any personally identifiable information in the free-text boxes. All experiences will remain anonymised for evidence processing and use in investigation reports and publications. For more details, please refer to our Privacy Notice, which explains that personal information will not be used to identify individuals.

The deadline for responding to the Call for Evidence is 11:59pm on 17 March 2026.

More info https://www.matneoinv.org.uk/call-for-evidence/

Have just completed

Thanks OP, will do as I had a fairly horrendous post-partum experience with my last child (different hospital, but noticeably worse than my previous experience).

Makes my heart sink to see this 'people who have been pregnant'. Sigh. At least women is in there too. But I do think it would be nice to recognise that medically speaking there is only a subset of 'people' who can be pregnant. I know that the purported aim of mangling language in this way is to spare feelings but one can't help but feel actually being pregnant would be far more triggering than medically accurate language.

I suspect poor maternity care and unwillingness to face cold hard biological reality are linked.

It's the activists who want this language I suspect not trans identified females. I'm sure given the choice they'd rather not go without pain relief, food or water once they've given birth than have to face the word 'woman' or 'female' in a consultation.

The ideological rot that this language exposes is why the NHS is failing women IMO.

I gave birth over 30 years ago for the first time and the experience was good, even though I was in the last stages of labour and had an emergency section cat 1, I had another chid over 25 ears ago and it was a VBAC. I was given so many choices.

fast forward and the last 4 years and I have attended numerous hospital appointments with my own dc and its very different. What struck me most was the pain relief is pathetic and almost non existent and even when something goes horribly wrong it's the patient that suffered due to me begging for pain relief . Ive had to be persistent and like a broken record. I wouldn't leave my adult children alone in hospital, so that I can advocate for them after what I have experienced.

Thank you for sharing. Perhaps it might be worth sharing with some of the other boards to get wider visibility? I see a lot of threads with mothers relating difficult experiences with maternity heath care.

Please do share on any other boards you feel it would be useful.

Have to admit I know nothing about other parts of MN, apart from here.

Also I have no personal connection to this, nor indeed the relevant personal experience, but thought from many threads on FWR that some would want to contribute.

Although I am sure there was only recently another formal investigation, and not sure how they all fit together.