Mercy to Mothers
If the Bill requiring local authorities to provide every practising midwife with analgesic drugs and apparatus, and training in their use, attracted a smaller attendance last Friday than had crowded the benches of the House of Commons a week earlier for the con- troversial Blood-Sports Bill, the reason obviously was that no one had supposed that a measure so necessary and so beneficent could be seriously contested. Nor, formally, was it. The Government assented to the second reading, which the Bill accordingly received without a division. The speeches commending the measure were informed, persuasive and often moving, particularly those by women members, and among these particularly that by Lady Tweedsmuir. They hardly could have been otherwise when so many of the speakers had suffered wholly unnecessary pain in.childbirth and were pleading that their sex hereafter should be spared the ordeal through which they themselves had been compelled to pass. In spite of this the Government's attitude gives rise to serious misgivings. In spite of the speeches, in spite of the virtual unanimity of the House, in spite of the standing of the dozen members of all parties who backed the Bill, there is a strong suspicion, disturbingly confirmed by the tepid comments of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health, that the Government, while it allowed a second reading, intends to kill the Bill at a later stage, on the ground that what it proposes will in due time be effected under the Health Service Act. No plea could be more unsatisfactory. If after this Bill has become law its operation can be co-ordinated with that of the National Health Service Act well and good. But the Bill aims at securing that something urgently necessary shall be effected within a given time (a maximum of four years) in the matter both of the training and in the supply of drugs and apparatus. It has evoked wide support throughout the country, in Labour circles as much as anywhere, and failure to facilitate its passage into law would rightly provoke general indignation.
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