Muslim countries comprise the majority of nationalities of foreign born mothers who gave birth in NHS hospitals in 2011. And many of these heifers aren’t immigrants, but health tourists who come to the UK just to drop their calves and not have to pay for it.
UK DAILY MAIL The Government has today revealed the top-ten most common nationalities of foreign-born women who gave birth in NHS hospitals in the last year.
The new record level of births to foreign-born mothers is more than double the proportion of 20 years ago, with women originally from Poland topping the list of top ten countries (Right), according to the Office for National Statistics. Other nations represented in the top ten include Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Somalia. Muslim women are more than double the number of women from Poland, with more than half of the top 10% coming from Muslim countries. (In the case of India and Nigeria, I allocated half the totals to Muslim women)
A total of 184,000 children were born in these circumstances, with almost half of them in London, which has a foreign-born mother rate of 56.7 per cent, far above the national average of 25.5 per cent.
According to official figures, the average hospital birth can cost £1,600, meaning the total cost to the NHS of these would have been at least £30million.
Some of the women will have been born abroad and settled in the UK but a number will have visited just to use the NHS. So called ‘health tourism’ as a whole is thought to cost taxpayers as much as £200 million ($300 million) a year.
HIGEST NUMBER OF BIRTHS IN 2011 TO FOREIGNERS IN THE UK CAME FROM THE MIDDLE EAST AND SOUTH ASIA
Urgent treatment, such as maternity care, is provided regardless of residence status or ability to pay but hospitals must take reasonable measures to recover debts from overseas patients if they can trace them. Some trusts are owed tens of millions by foreign patients and have been forced to write-off some of these debts.
It came as it was also announced that net migration to the UK is still at 216,000 a year, which is still double the Government’s 100,000 target. This means that means hundreds of thousands more people every year are coming to the UK when compared to numbers who leave.
Meanwhile the number of foreign-born mothers is rising consistently annually, with the figures now double what they were 30 years ago.
Figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that a 25.5 per cent of all children born in 2011 had foreign-born mothers, compared with 25.1 per cent the year before. It is the highest proportion of births to non-UK born mothers since parents’ country of origin was introduced in birth registration in 1969.
Women born in the UK had 1,957 fewer babies in 2011 compared with the previous year, in a reversal of rising numbers of births to UK-born women since 2002. Meanwhile mothers born outside the UK had 2,702 more babies, in line with a trend since 1995 for the number of births to women who came to the UK from abroad to rise year-on-year.
The ONS said: ‘This is the highest proportion of births to mothers born outside the UK since the collection of parents’ country of birth was introduced at birth registration in 1969. This proportion has increased every year since 1990, when it was just under 12 per cent, with a marked rise over the last decade. In 2001 the proportion of births to non-UK born mothers was 16.5 per cent.’
Wealthy Nigerian ‘Health’ Tourist travelled to the UK to give birth to quintuplets, and stuck taxpayers with a $300,000 bill.
Nigerian-born Bimbo Ayelabola, 33, right, travelled to Britain to give birth to quins at a cost of up to £200,000 ($300,000) to British taxpayers. The wife of a wealthy businessman had two boys and three girls by Caesarean section in April last year and was in Homerton Hospital, East London, for almost two weeks. Mrs Ayelabola, from Lagos, who had been taking a fertility drug, said at the time: ‘I had already had miscarriages and couldn’t bear the stress another pregnancy would cause.
So I decided to visit my family in London. ‘I thought I would stand a much better chance of avoiding another miscarriage in a calmer place with friends and family.’
Mrs Ayelabola claimed her husband left her and returned to Nigeria after discovering she had given birth to five babies. She was given a visa to stay in Britain which runs out in December of this year.
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