Maternity Service by Emma Barnett review

The Guardian

12-03-2025

Something is rotten in the state of British motherhood. It starts during pregnancy: in September, a safety watchdog found conditions at nearly half of NHS maternity units to be inadequate. It continues after childbirth: last year, the UK's maternal death rate reached a 20-year high; when babies are between six weeks and a year old, the leading cause of maternal death is suicide. It carries on at work: in one survey, 52% of women said they experienced some form of discrimination while pregnant or on maternity leave.
But reading Maternity Service, a slim new volume from BBC Today programme presenter Emma Barnett, you wouldn't gather that anything was seriously amiss. At least, nothing a new mother armed with the right polo neck, stretchy trousers, hip playlist and a stiff beverage couldn't gamely tackle.
Off the back of her second maternity leave, Barnett has set out to document the strange period of dislocation this time away from work represents. Her aim is to give new mothers advice and companionship as they cycle between feedings and naps and the steady drip of body fluids. 'We need to make it easier to talk honestly about what the process of parenting – and specifically this initial and intense probation period – actually feels like,' she writes. She is right about this, which is why it is all the more disappointing that Maternity Service is such a meagre offering.
Let's begin with the title: Barnett thinks maternity leave needs a rebranding. It's not 'leave' – it's a tour of service, a commitment to collective duty, she writes. Is that quite right? Those 12 months of employment protection are regarded as a sacred resource in the UK but, in reality, benefits vary vastly by employer. I was surprised, when I moved here from the US, to discover how common it is for women to deplete their savings – or go into debt – in order to stay at home during the first year of their child's life. 'We couldn't really afford it,' one friend told me, but, she said, it was what she felt she was supposed to do.
Barnett writes with a chatty candour; this book has the easy intimacy of a WhatsApp group fired off between nappy changes. She's looking to build rapport, confide, validate, and offer survival tips. The problem is her steely commitment to the status quo. Barnett notes that social expectations around maternity leave are out of sync with the realities – financial and otherwise. But she isn't interested in what it might take to revise those expectations. And even as she acknowledges the prevalence of maternal rage, she depicts it as just one more thing to be managed. Reading Maternity Service, I was reminded of a line early in the 2023 book Matrescence, when Lucy Jones describes her initial struggle to articulate the reality of her experience of early motherhood: 'I acquiesced. I used the language I had been given: the official lexicon for talking about motherhood. I fell in line.'
The pressure to fall in line is immense. But what would it take to make the experience of early motherhood a little less punitive? NHS maternity units could be better resourced. Laws protecting pregnant women and new mothers in the workplace could be strengthened. Childcare could be better subsidised. Fathers get just a passing mention in Maternity Service, but, critically, men could step up, noticing that the old models for bringing the next generation into the world need an overhaul.
Barnett often interviews powerful women but, strangely, any substantive insights they might have about early motherhood are missing, save a brief reference to a conversation about motherhood's impact on the brain with writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 'In the interview, we did the best we could to communicate from this far-off land,' Barnett writes, 'popping our heads above the trench to try to explain the unexplainable.'
Motherhood is gruelling and awesome. But is it 'unexplainable' – or simply undervalued? Perhaps some new mothers will find succour in the brave cheer of this pointedly pink book. For me, reading Maternity Service was a bleak reminder of how far we all still have to go.
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Maternity Service: A Love Letter to Mothers from the Front Line of Maternity Leave by Emma Barnett is published by Fig Tree (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.