The Mule

The first time I gave birth, they took the placenta away. They didn't ask. They just took it, and of course, I didn't notice. I was busy, waking up from the dream of birth, and falling in love with the first creature I laid eyes on. Weeks later, in the darkness of night, I remembered. Where was it? I had wanted to keep it. What had they done with it? Could I get it back? No. It was gone, and strange as it sounds, I cried. Not so much for the piece of my flesh - lost. I cried for the bigger loss it somehow stood for - the birth I wanted, but didn't get. Somehow, the birth I wanted got replaced with the birth they wanted. And, in the birth they wanted, nobody keeps their placenta. Why would they want to do that? So I cried, for the flesh lost, and the dreams disregarded. The second time I gave birth, they took the placenta away. They didn't ask. They just took it, and of course, I didn't notice. I was busy, waking up from the dream of birth, and falling in l...

Pregnant women are offered medical interventions so often that it's almost hard to imagine getting through an entire pregnancy and birth without having one. Whether it's injections, induction, or an intravenous drip, there are so many choices for women to make, and often they feel, quite understandably, that the best choice is to place their trust in the experts, who are, after all, offering them 'evidence based care'. But if midwives and obstetricians are offering 'evidence based care' - that is to say, they are making their recommendations based on good quality research - why then does the advice that individual clinicians offer, and the policies that individual hospitals and trusts implement, vary so greatly? A new report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) suggests that the disparity between hospital statistics has finally come to their attention, although I'm not clear why it has taken them so long to notice informat...

UPDATE: 26th April - IMUK have received word from Dan Poulter's office that he will meet with them on 7th May. IMUK are grateful to everyone who helped them campaign for this. OK, before we start, well Dan Poulter, he's the Health Minister for Women's Health. There are several different Health Ministers, all of whom report to Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health. You knew all that, right? Yup, me too, me too, just checking. So - Independent Midwives, who as we know,  face becoming illegal and extinct from October 2013 , have been trying to get a meeting with Dan Poulter for several months to discuss their demise and gain his help and support. Meeting with Dan Poulter is key to the IM's campaign. And yet, not only is he refusing to meet with them , he seems to be actively avoiding them . For example, IM's and their supporters have sent Christmas cards, Valentines cards, and hundreds of letters explaining their situation and the barriers they f...

I was extremely delighted to have my second article published by the Telegraph on the 18th April. It looked at the recent research that has made the news, suggesting that fathers are getting post traumatic stress disorder after witnessing their partners giving birth. Reading some of the coverage, I couldn't help but notice how readily the world seemed to accept that birth is a traumatic event, and wondered, as well as supporting fathers during and after difficult births, shouldn't we also be trying to make birth less traumatising for everyone - fathers, mothers and babies too? Read the full article here. Writing for the Telegraph, running The Positive Birth Movement, editing my book about water birth, trying to help in the campaign to Save Independent Midwifery , and gestating baby number three whilst looking out for one and two - well, I'm spread pretty thin, so apologies to all for my lack of blog posts at the moment. Somehow in between now an...

On average around 20% of UK women have their labours induced, some for medical reasons, others because they are 'post dates', that is, they have gone a certain number of days past their EDD (Estimated Due Date). How many days your care providers will 'let you' go past your EDD before pressuring for induction varies from trust to trust, but often women find that conversations about induction start on or even before their EDD, with 'sweeps' being routinely offered to encourage labour to start, and difficult to navigate meetings arranged with Obstetricians in which women are talked to about 'increasing risk'. Getting to the bottom of the actual reality of the risk of going past 41 or 42 weeks is tricky, mostly because so many women don't actually get this far. Midwife Thinking has a great article here about the balance of risks a woman contemplating agreeing to induction must consider. Many women feel under enormous pressure once the conversations...

This week, the fight to save Independent Midwifery intensified, as five hundred people congregated in London in silent protest. I wasn't able to be there, but I was thrilled to play my part in the day by writing this article, Why Independent Midwives are key to the fight for birth freedom , which appeared in the Telegraph online on Monday morning. Of course, this was very exciting for me on a personal level too, as this is the first time I have had an article published at this level. It's amazing what can happen when you "Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead" - two years ago I started out writing tentative little numbers about fish fingers and my daily struggle to leave the house , and today I found myself sat at a table in a London studio, with cans on my ears and a fuzzy mike in my face, being asked to make sense of some of the issues around the current state of birth freedom in the UK. I was joined my ...

The following article appeared in the Huffington Post today. Independent  Midwives, the only alternative to NHS maternity care available in the UK, are currently under threat. This Monday – 25 th March – they are taking to the streets of London in protest at a E.U.Directive that requires all registered health professionals to have mandatory insurance. Independent Midwives (I.M’s) won’t be able to get this insurance – due to their low numbers and the potentially high cost of claims the premiums would be prohibitively expensive – and unless the Government answers their call to help them find a workable solution, they face becoming illegal and extinct from October 2013. I first came across I.M’s during my second pregnancy in 2010. Having had a hospital forceps delivery with my first baby that, both physically and emotionally, took a long time to recover from, I knew the impact that a birth experience could have, and planned to have a home water birth with baby ...