The Mule

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...

Freedom for Birth, a new documentary film about human rights in childbirth, was screened in over a thousand locations across the world last Thursday, and I was there, keen to take part in a 'Mother's Revolution' supported by leading lights from the field - Ina May Gaskin, Sheila Kitzinger, Michel Odent - all calling for women to 'take back birth'. The film took as its focus the plight of Agnes Gereb, the Hungarian midwife currently under house arrest for attending women in illegal home births, and the related case of Ternovszky vs. Hungary, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that every woman has the right to choose where and how she gives birth. Quite clearly, there are some circumstances in which the compromise of freedom and the violation of human rights are tangible, for example when imprisonment is involved, or, as in another case touched on in the film, a woman's baby was taken away on the grounds of negligence because she has refused med...

I'm extremely excited to announce that I have been asked to edit a book - Water Birth: Stories to Inspire and Inform , to be published by Lonely Scribe . For me, the chance to immerse myself in a subject that I am so very passionate about, coupled with the fact that at the end of the process I will hold my book in my hands...well, it just couldn't get any better! The book will be about nine or ten months in the gestational stage, then spend it's fourth trimester with the publisher, so we are hoping to introduce it to the world around about July 2013. I'll obviously be blogging about the process along the way, and hopefully readers of The Mule will be able to help me out, as I am looking for stories of birth involving water. I'm hoping that the book will offer a wide variety of stories from different perspectives and serve to educate and inspire readers about the use and benefits of water during labour and delivery. This might be - a classic home or hospital ...