The Perceptions of Pregnancy blog, like the Researchers’ Network, aims to reach beyond boundaries and borders, and to facilitate an international and interdisciplinary conversation on pregnancy and its associated bodily and emotional experiences from the earliest times to the present day. This week’s post is contributed by George Campbell Gosling and examines the maternity provision before the NHS.

‘Delete the word “poor”.’[1] With this instruction in 1931, Liverpool Maternity Hospital’s Objects of the Institution were rewritten and its mission recast as providing hospital births to women of all classes. In doing so an answer was formally given to a question asked by the city’s Liberal Review nearly half a century before, back in 1882.

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