The Evidence

Muslim women and maternity care

The figures on maternity care in Britain fall harder on some women than others, and the reasons are structural. This is the evidence, and what a woman can carry into the room regardless.

The Barakah Birth Series · Article Two of Eight

Written by Hoda, founder of The Calm Mama Co and a qualified antenatal educator

In June 2025 the government ordered a national investigation into NHS maternity and neonatal services in England. Its chair, Baroness Amos, published her final report and recommendations on 30 June 2026, and among its findings sat a conclusion that earlier reviews had reached and the system had not acted on. Across maternity care, women were not being listened to, heard or believed, sometimes with devastating consequences. The investigation also found racism and discrimination running through the service, with Black, Asian and poorer families facing particular inequalities.

For Muslim women, the picture is harder to see clearly, because the data that exists is not really about them. Britain records maternal mortality by ethnicity, not by religion. There is no official figure for how many Muslim mothers die during pregnancy or after childbirth, because national maternal mortality statistics do not distinguish women by faith. They count ethnic group, and Muslim women in Britain belong to many.

Start with what is measured. The figures from MBRRACE-UK, the programme that audits maternal deaths across the United Kingdom, cover the years 2022 to 2024. They record an overall maternal death rate of 12.8 per 100,000 maternities, 20 per cent higher than in 2009 to 2011, the period against which the government's ambition to halve maternal mortality was measured.

Inside that overall figure sit sharp differences. A woman from a Black ethnic background is close to three times as likely to die during pregnancy or within six weeks afterwards as a White woman. A woman from an Asian background also had a somewhat higher recorded risk, although the difference from White women was not statistically significant in this period. A woman living in one of the most deprived areas of the country is around twice as likely to die as a woman in one of the least deprived. These gaps have proved stubborn, and the data shows that serious inequalities remain.

The health system counts ethnic group, not faith. There is no official figure for a Muslim mother's risk, because national maternal mortality statistics do not record it.

None of these figures describe Muslim women as such. They describe ethnic groups, and they hold a trap for anyone trying to understand Muslim mothers, because Muslim women in Britain are Bangladeshi and Pakistani and Arab and Black African and White convert and much else besides. There is no single Muslim experience of maternity care. There are many, and the women who sit where racism, poverty and religious discrimination meet can face these disadvantages together. A headline that flattens all of them into one figure would lose exactly the women it most needs to see.

Because the mortality data cannot see faith, the clearest account of what Muslim mothers meet in maternity care comes from asking them. In 2022 the Muslim Women's Network UK, working with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Muslim Women, did exactly that. Their report, titled Invisible, drew on a survey of more than a thousand Muslim women alongside interviews and a focus group, and it remains one of the most substantial accounts of its kind.

Around one in five of the women rated their maternity care as poor or very poor, most often during labour, birth and the days after it in hospital. Women described being pressured into inductions without receiving a clear explanation of the medical reasons. They described concerns raised and waved away, difficulties accessing pain relief, modesty disregarded, and assumptions made about them from their clothing, their accent or their name.

The report also found that the harm was not spread evenly. Women from some backgrounds, Bangladeshi, Arab and Black African among them, reported markedly worse care than others. The authors made a point of it. When a health system files every minority woman under a handful of broad headings, the differences between them disappear, and so does any chance of addressing what is specific to each. The title Invisible was chosen with care. Religious discrimination, sitting underneath racial discrimination, tends to go unrecorded, and around one in three people from Britain's minority ethnic communities is Muslim.

Set the testimony beside the national investigation, and the two describe one thing from different heights. What the investigation named in the language of policy, women not heard, information withheld at the moments it mattered, the women in Invisible had already described in the language of their own births. The pattern is built into the system, and a mother who meets it has met something assembled long before she arrived. She is not the reason it happens to her.

None of this is undone by a birth plan. It would be dishonest to tell a woman that the right preparation dissolves a problem built into a national system, and this is not that promise. What preparation changes is narrower and still worth a great deal: what a woman knows, what she can ask for, and how she is supported in the room. The investigation found that women were not consistently given the information they needed to make informed choices. So you arrive already holding some of it.

Informed choice is a legal right, and it includes the right to decline treatment. An induction can be questioned, its timing weighed, its reasons asked for and considered before you agree to anything. NICE's own guidance on inducing labour treats it as a decision to be discussed and chosen, and recognises that a woman may decline it. A woman who knows this, and who has read the evidence before she is tired and frightened and mid-sentence with a stranger, has something important to draw upon. The women in Invisible described pressure to accept inductions without adequate explanation. You can be the woman who asks why.

A written record of your preferences does quiet, specific work. It sets down, before labour begins, what matters to you: how you wish to be spoken to, what you want for pain, who may be present, what your modesty requires, what you would want considered before any intervention is proposed. It is your voice for the hour when you may not be able to use it as easily, and it gives whoever is beside you something to draw upon on your behalf.

And you should not be the only one holding it. A birth partner who has been prepared, who knows your preferences as well as you do and is not the one in pain, can help carry your voice when you have gone inward. They can ask the question you are too deep to ask, remind the team of the preferences you set in advance, and make sure the written record in your bag is actually read. Their role is to support you in making and communicating your own decisions. In a system that the evidence says does not always listen, a second calm and prepared voice in the room counts for a great deal. Where it can be arranged, seeing the same midwife or small team through pregnancy and birth is one of the few things shown to improve both outcomes and experience, and it is worth asking about.

You cannot reform a national system on the morning you give birth. That work is real and slow, and it belongs to the reports and the campaigns and the years ahead. But a woman who walks into the room informed, clear about what she wants, carrying a written record of it and accompanied by someone prepared to advocate alongside her, stands in a different place from the woman who walks in with none of that. She has changed what she brings to it, even when the system behind it has not yet moved.

This is the older teaching in a modern room. You prepare with everything you have, the knowledge, the document, the companion, the questions ready, and then you place the outcome where it always belonged, with Allah.

Tie the camel, then trust.

There is no contradiction between tawakkul and preparation. Asking questions does not mean you trust Allah any less. Neither does understanding your rights, seeking a second opinion or making clear what matters to you. Taking the means available to you is part of that trust. You do what is within your ability, knowing that the outcome was never yours to control.

A difficult birth is not evidence that a woman failed to prepare or failed to place her trust in Allah. Preparation is an act of responsibility. It was never a guarantee.

This is the work The Calm Mama Co exists to do: to hand a mother the evidence, the language, the birth preferences document and the tools to prepare her birth partner, so that whatever room she ends up in, she arrives informed, supported and better able to make herself heard. You did not choose this system. You can still decide, in detail and in advance, how you will meet it.

Hoda

Founder, The Calm Mama Co · qualified antenatal educator

If you have not read it, the first article in the series, What fear does to labour, looks at what fear itself does inside the labouring body. And the Maryam Reflection Card holds the story of a woman who met fear entirely alone and was answered, at the peak of it, with a voice, a provision, and a calm that came down to meet her.

This article is for information and preparation. It does not replace advice from your midwife, doctor or maternity team.

Further reading: A Letter to the Beautiful Mama · The Maryam Reflection Card

The sources behind this piece, and the places we send mothers for the evidence, for their rights, and for faith-centred and Muslim maternal health. External sites change and evidence moves, so treat each as a starting point and read it in full. The same library lives, and is kept current, on our resources page.