I WRITE as a mother, and a qualified birth educator for the past 14 years. I have been teaching pregnancy yoga and ante-natal classes in this area since I moved here from London in 1992.

A significant proportion of women attending my weekly classes become very interested in the possibility of having their babies at the Devizes unit but are usually completely unaware of its existence until they learn of it from me, or the other mothers in the group.

The midwife unit at Devizes is a closely guarded secret in the Marlborough area. GPs and ante-natal clinic midwives do not mention it as an option to expectant mothers. Even women who do know of it and raise it as a possibility as a place of birth tell me they meet with a disapproving or otherwise discouraging response.

It is strongly implied that any mother choosing to give birth there would be taking an irresponsible risk. This is pure bias because the research evidence regarding the safety of birth outcomes at units like these, and the satisfaction of the women who use them, is abundantly clear.

In a health service where it is now de rigueur to see wholesale care in the community as a safe and viable option, quite often in cases where the patients in question are seriously ill, why is it that so many perfectly healthy women are being herded into hospitals for birth? The environment in most consultant hospital birth units such as Great Western is so diametrically opposed to their need of quiet, privacy and security.

It is no wonder that labour is so difficult for many women and that traumatic and expensive medical interventions are often necessary to compensate for the impaired functioning of the mother's hormonal physiology caused by the difficult and unnatural environmental conditions.

Scientific studies in recent years clearly show that rates of spontaneous normal birth differ hugely depending on where you have your baby, with home birth and midwife-led birth unit deliveries providing the best chance of a natural birth, and uninterventive birth being least likely in large hospital units. Birth interventions are very costly, and not just financially. There is a growing body of research showing that the way women give birth, and the way babies are born impacts on the health and behaviour of both for the rest of their lives.

The suggestion that the life-long health of more mothers and babies in this corner of Wiltshire should be jeopardised as a result of the closure of a centre of excellence like the Devizes Maternity Unit to save money for the Kennet and North Wiltshire Primary Care Trust would be farcical if it weren't so tragic.

Wiltshire Health Authority would be better advised to make Devizes more viable by ensuring that it is more widely promoted. By so doing the Trust stands to avoid the otherwise inevitable increase in maternity service expenditure on a lot of drugs, technology and Caesarean sections as even more local mothers are forced into unnecessary hospital births.

ALICE CHARLWOOD

Puffets Cottage

Ramsbury