We're not too posh to push idiots off cliffs God bless the Honourable Kirstie Allsopp. Dear old Kirstie, whose Left-wing critics often accuse her of being too posh to have a meaningful opinion, has spoken up in defence of those women labelled "too posh to push." In a letter published in The Daily Telegraph yesterday, the television presenter slammed the presumption that women have caesarean sections because they are too lazy, busy or frightened to go through natural birth. Responding to a report at the weekend that found expectant mothers in wealthy areas were more likely to have C-sections, Allsopp wrote that the "too posh to push" phrase "does nothing to ease the distress of women who may have been through a very traumatic experience and major abdominal surgery... the current obsession with how a baby is born and fed can lead to huge distress on the part of women who feel that they have failed to give birth 'naturally" or are unable to breastfeed. We should all look to celebrate the safe delivery of a baby, and be thankful that we have easy access to a procedure that saves countless lives. Hooray for Kirstie, who has me nodding along like a drooling version of the dog in the Churchill advert. Though I am still a month off having a baby - by stork, caesarean or otherwise - I found the report deeply galling on behalf of people who bear large abdominal scars, not because they wanted to keep their private parts intact or be spared the pain of labour, but because they had broken their back five years earlier, or had a heart defect, and it was deemed unsafe for them to deliver "naturally." I find it especially galling on behalf of my friend who had an emergency C‑section at one of the hospitals named in the report. The Chelsea and Westminster might sound posh but she, who was having her baby on the NHS, found the service to be anything but world-class when, after 72 hours in labour, she was wheeled in for a C-section and her epidural wore off. A year ago my eyes would glaze over at childbirth stories, but that was before I entered the strange world of pregnancy. Though one would balk at telling a man how to have his appendix out, or feel embarrassed at lecturing a woman on how to use her breasts, the same courtesies are not extended to expectant and new mothers. Pregnancy is everybody's specialist Mastermind subject. Hence the presumption that natural birth is good and bottle-feeding is bad. Just try telling that to a woman who has been rushed into theatre with a condition that 50 years ago would have killed both her and her unborn child, or to a new mother whose baby can't nurse. Not that any of this bothers the pregnancy prattlers who will gleefully tell you about hypnobirthing and home birth and how important it is to have an at-home maternity nurse available in the first few weeks after labour, though goodness knows how you are supposed to pay for this after buying the buggy, car seat and baby monitor, every item of which people will have an opinion on, too. Early on in my pregnancy, a woman I vaguely know got in touch to tell me that if I was giving birth in London, I should do it privately, as she had "heard so many horror stories about maternity services there." She had both her children in Berlin. A family friend told me I should have my thyroid tested by doctors as "they never do this and it can be very dangerous. Also, with a bump that size you probably have gestational diabetes. Thanks, I thought, before anxiously going to my GP who - through the miracle of medicine rather than old wives" tales - was able to discover that I didn't. I know I put myself in the firing line of pregnancy prattlers, but as the "too posh to push" report shows, all new mothers now run the risk of being judged for nothing more than the crime of wanting to give birth safely to a healthy child.