UK APPG on Birth Trauma: Listen to Mums (2024)
25,000-30,000 women/year get birth PTSD in the UK alone
UK government inquiry. 25,000-30,000 women/year develop birth PTSD in the UK alone. 84% of women with tears not properly informed beforehand. Led to calls for systemic reform.
The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Birth Trauma published a government inquiry in 2024 titled Listen to Mums. The inquiry took testimony from over 1,300 women describing traumatic births in the National Health Service. The report estimates that between 25,000 and 30,000 women in the UK develop diagnosable birth-related PTSD each year.
One of the most damning specific findings: 84 percent of women who experienced significant perineal tears reported that they had not been properly informed beforehand about the risk or the consequences. The report led to formal recommendations for systemic NHS reform, including mandatory informed consent before any episiotomy or assisted delivery and a national standard for postnatal mental health screening. Most of those reforms have not yet been enacted.
25-30K
UK PTSD cases per year
84%
Tear patients not informed beforehand
1,300+
Women giving testimony
2024
Inquiry published
Why it matters
A formal government inquiry, with sworn testimony, concluded that birth trauma is producing tens of thousands of new PTSD cases per year in a single country. The numbers are not contested. The system response is.
This is one finding from the research library behind How to Birth a Mother. Everything here traces back to a study, a dataset, or a systematic review.