Book review: Hard Pushed, by Leah Hazard

Hard Pushed is a memoir of midwifery, drawn from Leah Hazard’s years of experience in the NHS. Leah’s words bring the reader right into the maternity ward, sketching her colleagues and the women she cares for with mostly loving detail. This is a very different book from Ellie Durant’s New Walk, but similarly gives a real feel for the pressures and joys of modern midwifery.

Hard Pushed is structured into pairs of chapters, briefly describing a theme, and then illustrating the theme with a story. We have Eleanor the lesbian mother, Star the hypnobirther, the 15 year old mum, the woman being pressured to breastfeed, the trafficked woman: composites and archetypes of the swirling complex mass of human need encountered in a midwife’s world. These women serve to illustrate what it’s like to be a midwife, and the real insight here is very much from a midwife’s perspective. So we see how incredibly hard midwives work, getting through the day on biscuits and coffee, with barely time to go to the loo; and this gives context to the irritation that comes across at the many tiny anxieties expressed by pregnant women, and the dialogue with women in labour that skates over informed consent (“‘We might have to make a wee cut,’ I call brightly.”) For any reader unaware of the overload on our maternity services, this is a very clear picture.

But Leah does write with love, and what comes across is the midwife every woman wants to meet in labour: intuitive, kind, skilled, and willing to bend the rules just enough to personalise care when it matters most. She writes with gentle humour, but doesn’t steer clear of the bleaker stories. And as in real life, leaves many of the vignettes with an unresolved ending, just as these women leave her maternity ward to get on with their own lives, unlikely to be seen again.

This is a book that can be read for easy entertainment, but the subtext is not hidden far below the surface: midwifery is a challenging vocation. It does me good to be reminded of the efforts going on behind the scenes, and to be thankful that there are women prepared to do this work in such trying circumstances.

[Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of Hard Pushed]