The Mule

Yesterday I was honoured to be a part of the Birthrights Dignity in Childbirth Forum, held at the Royal College of Physicians in London. I gave a short presentation about my organisation The Positive Birth Movement , which I'm reproducing here for those who were unable to attend and might be interested to read it. Below the presentation I'm also sharing the 'submission' that was made to Birthrights about the Positive Birth Movement, which gives more detailed information about the organisation, including some fantastic feedback from those who facilitate and attend our groups. Please come and join the PBM on Facebook , Twitter , or get in touch with me if you would like more information or want to be involved in any way. You can find your nearest Positive Birth group on our website: www.positivebirthmovement.org . Presentation: My name is Milli Hill, and a year ago this month I set up the Positive Birth Movement. It all started with a very little idea – the ...

I once read somewhere that the goal of psychotherapy is to reveal the secrets we are keeping, even from ourselves. We all do this. We all keep a few bits of reality out of sight, sometimes because they are painful, but more often, perhaps, simply because to acknowledge them would be a difficult admission of a lifetime of misguided beliefs, misdirected energy, and mistakes. We see this a lot with the birth issue. Sometimes it's as if simply talking about birth in a positive way is too much for people to tolerate. The cultural attitude that birth is dangerous and downright unpleasant has become so engrained that many people seem to no longer see it as an attitude at all - they see it as a solid FACT. To challenge this would involve accessing ways of thinking that, whilst they may exist, are completely beyond everyday awareness, like rooms in a mansion that have been put under dust sheets and long forgotten. In the media, journalists with the power and influence for positive cha...

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...

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...

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 ...

This article has now been published in the Huffington Post. Tapping into the twenty first century zeitgeist is easy, and a bit fun - you just have to tap into Google. For example, enter ‘very scared of’ … and you’ll see the top four things that people are very scared of, right now, like this: Many women are scared, afraid, terrified of giving birth. Some – as many as one in ten – suffer from Tocophobia , a morbid fear of giving birth that leads them to seek elective caesarians if they can. Others, while they may not have a diagnosable psychological disorder, are still extremely anxious and fearful about the task of bringing their baby into the world. It’s not really surprising that so many women feel this way. The media portrayal of birth ranges from the rather ridiculous soap opera version – 'woman looking terrified and sweaty delivers baby in pub drama' – to programs like One Born Every Minute – 'woman looking terrified and sweaty begs for dru...

Too many women are not having a positive birth experience. A positive birth experience does not always have to be a natural, blissful, drug free birth. But it does have to be a birth in which a woman feels she has had freedom of choice, access to accurate information, and that she is in control, powerful and respected. And it should also be a birth that she approaches with some trepidation, yes, but without fear or dread, and a birth that she then goes on to enjoy, and later remember with warmth and pride. Currently, we are stuck in a loop that is hard to break. It goes something like this: The 'Fear Becomes Fact' Cycle of Negativity Often, when as birth activists we try to address this loop, we focus, quite rightly, on what happens in the hospital. We wish there was less intervention, we question how much of it is necessary, and we shake our fists at the doctors who anaesthetise, yank and cut away women's hopes of a natural or positive experience. But what ...