Love Island’s Cally Jane Beech has opened up about her traumatic 32-hour labour, as she vows to try and be a “voice for people’ that suffer through the same ordeal.
Cally claims that the health services delayed her epidural, leaving her furious about the way she was treated and accusing staff of putting her daughter’s life at risk.
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Explaining that it had already taken 17 long hours for a dilation of three centimetres, an enraged Cally told The Sun: “If I hadn’t have had the epidural then, and they’d kept putting it off like they wanted to, I’d have been in serious trouble.
“The baby could have died by then.”
Speaking out about the incident prompted fans to get in touch with her with their own nightmare birth stories, which Cally admits had a profound effect on her and led her to describe it as a “human rights” issue.
“I promised I would try and be a voice for people, this shouldn’t be happening in this day and age. Where are the human rights?
“People in prison have more human rights than women. It shouldn’t be up to anyone else to decide when you’ve had enough pain.”
The distressing circumstances have clearly had a lasting effect on the reality TV star, who has pledged to put off a second pregnancy for the near future to allow herself time to heal.
She confessed: “It’s scared me a little bit. Now every time I see a pregnant woman I’m like ‘I feel sorry for you’.
“It has really affected me to be honest.”
“I do look at Vienna and think it’s worth it, but then I do sit and think about the people that don’t get their babies at the end of it and something needs to change.”
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Cally and her Love Island co-star Luis Morrison welcomed baby Vienna on 7 May, and despite the difficult birth, the new mum seems to have had no problem adapting to motherhood, posting a number of sweet snaps of her and the newborn on her Instagram page.