“The future of the midwife depends on her power to relieve pain”.^∗ The rise and fall of the Analgesia in Childbirth Bill (1949)☆

Summary 

The Analgesia in Childbirth Bill (1949) remains the only attempt in British history to give mothers the legal right to pain relief in childbirth. It provides a useful introduction to the major themes in the history of British obstetric anaesthesia and analgesia under the National Health Service. This paper places the bill in the dual contexts of long-standing concern over the status of British midwives and persistent governmental squabbling over the cost of the National Health Service. For its sponsors, the National Birthday Trust Fund, the bill provided an opportunity both to improve the availability of analgesia to mothers in childbirth and to reassert their dominance as leaders in the field of analgesia research. For the Ministry of Health under a Labour Minister, Aneurin Bevan, however, the bill represented both a (concealed) Conservative attack on the newly socialised British medical system and a further burden on the already overtaxed coffers of the National Health Service. Bevan’s opposition to, and eventual defeat of, this enormously popular bill found its roots in the bill’s economic implications rather than its clinical or humanitarian consequences.

Keywords: History of medicine, History of obstetric anaesthesia, History of midwifery, History of National Health Service

• ∗ Letter from Arnold Walker, Chairman, CMB, to Sir John Charles, Chief Medical Officer, MoH, 9 Jun 1950, MoH Papers, National Archive DV 6/6.