A mother has spoken publicly about the trauma of making 100 mile journeys while heavily pregnant to give birth in Inverness after maternity services in Caithness were downgraded. Campaigners are now backing legal action, arguing that forcing women to travel such distances breaches their human rights. I think they are right.
The Reality of Rural Maternity Care
Caithness is not a suburb of Inverness. It is a remote part of the Scottish Highlands where the A9 is the only road south, where winter conditions can make that road impassable, and where the distance between a pregnant woman’s home and a hospital bed can feel like a continent. When maternity services were downgraded, women in Caithness lost the ability to give birth locally. They were told to travel to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, roughly 100 miles away.
One mother has described feeling traumatised by the experience. She is not being dramatic. Imagine being in the late stages of pregnancy, knowing that when labour begins you face a two hour drive on a single carriageway road through some of the most exposed terrain in Scotland. Imagine making that journey in January, in the dark, in a storm.
The Human Rights Argument
Campaigners say this situation breaches women’s human rights, and I struggle to see how it does not. Access to safe maternity care is not a luxury. It is a fundamental expectation of a modern health service. Telling women they must travel 100 miles in labour, or risk giving birth on the A9, is not a policy decision. It is an abdication of responsibility.
Scotland’s women’s health champion has warned that a national maternity review must not be a whitewash. Inspections have already highlighted staffing and safety concerns across the system. Caithness is the sharpest edge of a much larger problem.
The Centralisation Trap
This is what happens when health service planners centralise without considering geography. Scotland is not England. You cannot apply the same logic to a country where communities are separated by mountains, lochs, and single track roads. A model that works in the central belt, where hospitals are 20 minutes apart, does not work in the Highlands, where they might be 100 miles apart.
The legal challenge deserves support. Not because lawyers are the answer to everything, but because it has taken the threat of legal action to make anyone in Edinburgh pay attention to what women in Caithness have been saying for years: this is not safe, this is not fair, and this must change.