It’s generally understood that the Con Dem cuts are going to affect women disproportionately. As this report from the Guardian shows it will even affect the process of having a baby. The Royal College of Midwives has not been part of the traditional class struggle wing of the trade union movement but even they are indignant about the Con Dems’ lies.

Cathy Warwick, the general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), said she had serious concerns that there were too few midwives to ensure proper standards of care for new mothers and babies.

"I fear for the future of maternity services, that the quality of care will fall and that safety could be compromised. I fear that midwives who are toiling away doing their best will become even more disillusioned," said Warwick, who represents the UK’s 30,000 midwives, in a hard-hitting speech to the RCM’s annual conference in Manchester.

"Most of all I fear that women and their babies will be ill-served by maternity services. The government’s lack of response about this seems at best bewildering, and at worst a clear refusal to do something about it."

She accused David Cameron and Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, of breaking promises made before the election to increase midwife numbers by 3,000. Writing in the Sun in January, Cameron said: "We are going to make our midwives’ lives a lot easier. They are crucial to making a mum’s experience of birth as good as it can possibly be, but today they are overworked and demoralised. So we will increase the number of midwives by 3,000."

But since taking power both men have consistently refused to honour that pledge, said Warwick. When the NHS business plan was published last week, it contained no mention of midwife numbers.

Repeated efforts by the RCM since May to get either minister to commit to their pre-election pledges have had neither success nor response, she added. "The silence on this issue from the government is deafening. When they were outside government they were promising much; now they are committing to nothing.

"I am very concerned that the needs of pregnant women are greater than ever before, the birthrate remains high, yet we are still acutely short of midwives. The RCM is well aware of the pressures on public spending, but midwives are already doing more for less. It now it looks like they will be asked to do even more with fewer resources and fewer staff," Warwick said.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which represents maternity doctors, shared the RCM’s unease about staffing levels, saying there are also too few doctors on wards. The birth and parenting charity the NCT is also worried about maternity units that are "struggling" to provide high-quality care under growing pressures.

Warwick, who this week launches a new "Protect maternity services" campaign, said more midwives are needed to meet the increasing demands being made on maternity units. The birthrate is soaring, and growing numbers of mothers who are obese, have an ongoing medical condition or are older or younger than the norm, mean midwives are facing increasing workloads, both in labour and postnatally, because such higher-risk cases can require greater time and care.

In an RCM survey earlier this week, many heads of midwifery said that their units were facing cuts to their budgets, staffing levels or both. In her speech, Warwick strongly criticised Lansley for first committing in his reform white paper in July to the future commissioning of maternity services being done jointly by the new NHS commissioning board and maternity networks, only to more recently hand responsibility to the new consortiums of GPs.

"To say I am disappointed would be a major understatement," she said. "The RCM and other Royal Colleges and user groups felt that the needs of women and babies would be best served with commissioning done by the people who know most about it: midwives, and other health professionals working in that field. I think the decision is short-sighted and ill-thought-through."