James Drife is Emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Leeds and a former Honorary President of Baby Lifeline. His long association with this important charity includes educational events in many places including Kuwait, where a team of experts organised by Baby Lifeline provided training for local and Iraqi doctors in 2005 as the war subsided.

James was born in Cardiff and raised in Ayrshire, and graduated in Edinburgh in 1971. He gained his MD in 1981 with a thesis on the normal breast. He worked in Bristol and Leicester before moving in 1990 to Leeds as professor. He retired in 2009.

Between 1992 and 2011 he was a national obstetric assessor for the UK Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths (CEMD) as well as being its Medical Director alongside the Director, Professor Gwyneth Lewis. The CEMD became part of MBRRACE in 2012.
James has been a vice-president of the RCOG, an elected member of the GMC, and Editor- in-Chief of the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology. He was also an editor or Board member of leading British and American journals of O&G. Between 2004 and 2013 he was a consultant, with Gwyneth Lewis, on WHO’s “Making Pregnancy Safer” project, working mainly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

He was regular a BMJ columnist for 25 years and his collected columns were published in 2020 as This Medical Life. His columns in a specialist journal appeared as This Gynaecological Life. His most recent book, co-authored with fellow CEMD assessors, is Why Mothers Died and How their Lives Are Saved. It tells the story of how confidential enquiries have made pregnancy safer in the UK and across the world. It was included in the USA’s list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 2024 and is now available in paperback.

His hobby is songwriting. As a founder member of Abracadabarets he appeared many times on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe between 1974 and 2011.

In retirement one of his roles was President of York Medical Society. He’s now helping to write its history in advance of its 200th anniversary. He and his wife Diana (a retired GP) still live in Leeds. Their children and grandchildren live in London. Their son Tom is a company lawyer and their daughter Jenny is an NHS psychiatrist in the START team, working with homeless people in Lambeth, Southwark and Croydon.