In 2017 Rhiannon Davies, her husband Richard and two other bereaved parents, Kayleigh and Colin Griffiths asked the UK health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to set up a public inquiry into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust.
[6] In November 2019 the leaked interim report confirmed Davies' worst fears and vindicated her efforts: I couldn’t accept that we were the only people that this had happened to which is why we pushed for an investigation.
[7]When published in December 2020, the first Ockenden Report singled out the difference made by Davies, Stanton and two other bereaved parents, Kayleigh and Colin Griffiths: The parent’s unrelenting commitment to ensuring their daughters’ lives were not lost in vain continues to be remarkable [...] In a void described by the families as ‘incomprehensible pain’, they undertook their own investigations to highlight the deaths of their newborn daughters, and to insist upon meaningful change in maternity services that could save other lives.
[10] However as James Titcombe and Nadine Montgomery pointed out, in the week the Ockenden report was published, NHS adverts were still producing messages that promote the role of midwives as ‘guardians of normal birth’.
As Lady Hale said in her judgement on Montgomery's case: some obstetricians feel "that a vaginal delivery is in some way morally preferable to a caesarean section: so much so that it justifies depriving the pregnant woman of the information needed for her to make a free choice.