TV Caesarean horror show

During the programme I found myself feeling intensely sorry for Lisa and her partner. She was like a lamb to the slaughter, almost ritually.

There she was, all heaving belly and wreathed in smiles, while the anaesthetist plunged a needle in her back - right into her back! - and waited for a few drops of spinal fluid to leak out. That alone had me feeling decidedly queasy.

But there was Lisa smiling, saying how lucky she felt having a Caesarean because it was less painful. How would she know?

She then seemed to sink into a state of semi-consciousness while myriads of green-robed people wandered in and out of the operating room poking and prodding as if she were a factory farmed piece of meat. There was an array of cutting implements that would not look out of place in an abattoir. The lights were extremely bright.

The operation itself was almost unwatchable. Lisa was opened up like a piece of whale meat - all blubbery fat and red with fingers prodding here and there and probing and pulling and sucking until there, like the holy grail, was revealed the slimy, grey round uterus where the precious baby lay. After a quick incision, the poor little mite was dragged out, looking as if he were covered in lard and screaming.

"What an angry boy!" said the surgeon. Of course he was angry! Who would want to come into the world like that? And he looked so weird, not pink and round and sleepy but blue and cross. I had never seen a newborn like him.

Lisa and her partner were, quite rightly, moved by the arrival of their third child. Everyone looked pretty moved but poor Lisa could not even cuddle and caress her newborn as she still had to be put back together and stitched up.

It left me feeling that Caesareans were rather barbaric. One in four women has them, and they are, I am sure, very safe operations. Yet it seemed such a strange and violent way to bring a baby on to the earth.

Arguments are raging around the number of women going under the knife and the plans are for the NHS to reduce this figure. Maybe, having seen this programme, more women will chose to persevere with a natural birth. I do hope so. We are not supposed to give birth through our stomachs.