By Cindi John BBC News community affairs reporter

A report published on Thursday is highly critical of the maternity care offered to Muslims. One Birmingham woman, Zaynah Joseph, shares her experience of pregnancy and birth.

Modesty is a key issue for Muslim women during pregnancy and birth

Throughout the pregnancy I think there was just a general disregard to the fact that I was a Muslim.

Everyone was very polite and I can't say that I experienced any direct racism but it is still racism in a way because of the ignorance.

Although the staff try their best, they just care about you medically and they don't see that for us it's the whole package, a whole way of life.

I did see male doctors but was never examined by one. It is an issue for me and even at my GPs I wanted a female doctor - it was a struggle to find one in the area I live in.

For the birth I did ask that only women be in the room and that I would have a female midwife.

Most of the time during the birth I had a female doctor but in the last half of my labour a male doctor came to examine me because they were concerned my daughter was in distress.

I was OK with that as my husband was there but there were other men coming in and out of the room not even related to my case, they just wanted to speak to a colleague.

'Selfish'

I normally cover my head with a hijab but I took it off when I was in labour. At the time there was just me, the midwife and my husband in the room but then I had no control about who was coming in and out.

I felt uncomfortable but sometimes because you're actually in labour you just carry on. It's not until afterwards when you look back you think '"that was really terrible".

Food was a huge issue for me. I was in hospital for five days because my little girl was ill but generally almost every day if somebody didn't bring me something to eat there wasn't enough halal food to go around.

Sometimes there'd only be two halal meals and there'd be six to 12 Muslim women on the ward. A lot of the other Muslim women were upset and some of them insisted on going home early.

I don't think I would go back to that hospital to have another baby.

It is in an area which serves a large population of Muslim women so just to completely disregard them is pretty selfish really.

Even if you don't believe what somebody else believes, if you're serving a community you should respect their way of life.

It might just be resources and faith is generally last on the list but it shouldn't be really because you want to feel comfortable and have a good experience of birth.