A minor glitch related to rationing and waste and poor centralized planning in their universal health care system. Whatever. I’m sure it’ll be fine, ladies.

Do it for Teddy.

Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley, who obtained the figures, said Labour had cut maternity beds by 2,340, or 22 per cent, since 1997. At the same time birth rates have been rising sharply – up 20 per cent in some areas…

‘It shows the incredible waste that has taken place that mothers are getting this sort of sub-standard treatment despite Gordon Brown’s tripling of spending on the NHS.

‘Labour have let down mothers by cutting the number of maternity beds and by shutting down maternity units.’…

The NHS employs the equivalent of around 25,000 full-time midwives in England, but the Government has promised to recruit 3,400 more.

However, the Royal College of Midwives estimates at least 5,000 more are needed to provide the quality of service pledged in the Government’s blueprint for maternity services, Maternity Matters.

At the same time almost half of all midwives are set to retire in the next decade.

Follow the link for a list of colorful places British mothers have found themselves in when the moment of truth arrived. The elevator has a certain romance about it, I’ll concede. Meanwhile, via Greg Hengler, a new clip from the media man of the hour on the state of our own glorious national health-care experiment. I have to say, he makes sense here: There’s going to come a point where the Democrats have invested so much political capital in this debacle that they have no choice but to plow ahead and pass something. I think we’ve already reached it; Russ Feingold evidently doesn’t. What do the Dems gain now, though, by dropping ObamaCare and moving on to the next statist dreamquest, be it cap-and-trade or amnesty or whatever? Unless they’re planning a radical change of strategy aimed at halting spending and performing triage on the deficit, they might as well go for broke. They’re going to suffer politically either way; why not at least get something for it?

Note his choice of pronoun near the end of the clip, incidentally.