None of my sisters or sisters in law have ever called an ambulance for labour, even in the middle of the night when their waters have broken and the father is on nightshift. As already mentioned, advanced planning is the key, and surely everyone knows someone with a car. My sister in law in Norway went into labour long before she was due. The temperature was -30 and my brothers car wouldn't start. They had to flag someone down in the street to get help. The males in the family tend to be a little accident prone, getting their heads bashed with garage doors and then walking in covered with blood. Mum calmly mops the blood up to see "what the real damage is" as she puts it, and then drives them to hospital if it's needed. Mr Man cut his arm open with a stanley knife when he was on home leave from a psychiatric ward, so I wrapped his bleeding arm in a clean towel and drove him back to the ward. His Mum has called me in the middle of the night with laboured breathing saying "I can't breath", so I picked her up and drove her to the hospital where she was admitted for about a week. And then I read on here that some people call for an ambulance for a nose bleed. And when my newborn baby nephew couldn't breath properly and needed to be admitted into hospital there were no beds so he had to go to a different hospital further away, but his parents were told that there were no ambulances to take him, so he had to be driven there by his uncle (my point being that he may have needed medical assistance on the way there). Isn't it about time we had a Panorama program about the abuse of these services?