About you:
You will be listened to: you are any birthworker’s best source of information regarding your own well-being and the welfare of your growing baby.
You will be given up to date evidence based information including where appropriate ‘nobody knows, there just isn’t the research’ which is rather more commonly true than I’d want it to be.
You will be offered the widest menu of available options in any given scenario, and the pros and cons of each option given time for consideration and informative discussion.
You will be given time and support to choose the option which feels most appropriate for you, as there is no ‘golden path’ route through maternity.
You will then be supported on that path, given regular signposting of any alternative routes that arise and the freedom to entirely change direction at any point if your feelings change. Your choices will be defended if they are negated by other service providers.
You will not be told what to do but you will be given unbiased, non-coercive information so that you can make the best decisions for yourself and your baby. I do not practice ‘fluffy bunnies’ birth work as there are never any guarantees in maternity (as there are none in life), but scaremongering is not an acceptable aspect of any maternity care provision. The pros and cons of your various options will be explained to you with robust research evidence supplied where available. The role of a good doula is to generally assume there will be good outcomes (as that is mostly the case) but to be always already vigilant and prepared for any deviations from normal, just in case, and to support you and your baby as safely as possible through these.
About me:
I came to birth work later in my career, but began my journey when pregnant with my first child twenty-four years ago. This was my second pregnancy, made difficult through hyperemesis (extreme pregnancy sickness) and the memory of my first one with a baby that died at 14 weeks gestation. But I had the most fantastic Midwife this time, Terrie Waddington, at a time when NHS staff had more time and support to provide women with the care they need. He was born, all was well and I carried on teaching photography both on a University Fine Art programme and with community groups and schoolchildren with complex requirements. I loved it but something was niggling away. I explored my interest in birthing through my artistic practice, making work which represented this process as a thing people do, rather than something done to them, as I’d found so many representations of birth sadly lacking.
My third pregnancy, also complicated by the dreaded hyperemesis, brought me back into Terrie’s care. She was amazing again, warm, caring, hugely knowledgeable and with a fundamental belief that pregnancy and birthing were exciting but perfectly normal events in families’ lives and that my body was wonderfully designed for this. I knew what I wanted to do: she was inspirational, and I thought she had the best job in the world.
I went back to University, and into the NHS for the first time. I met some amazing midwives, and had fantastically supportive mentors but I found the hospital an increasingly strange environment for birth. I fully support the NHS, all Independent Midwives do, and I continued to work the odd bank shift on a busy maternity ward and as a covid volunteer supporting an NHS home birth team throughout my time as a Midwife . However, I could support clients within the NHS the way I could working outside of it. I found not knowing the 'patients' and their families, not having enough time to spend with them and the resulting overuse of ‘box-ticking’ difficult to cope with and unfulfilling. This wasn’t what I had envisaged.
I also encountered a strange unspoken but pervasive assumption that women and birthing people didn’t really know what was best for themselves or their babies, that they should be encouraged, persuaded, even coerced into compliance with whatever plan was being presented to them. But I was looking at evidence, attending conferences, reading research articles that indicated that very often NOBODY KNOWS what the best plan is in any given set of circumstances, but that one thing was certain: these people had lived in their own bodies all of their lives and had grown their babies from conception so nobody knew them better, and they themselves would be living with the pros and the cons of the decisions being made. So they, and only they, needed to make the decisions, without pressure, free from coercion and with time, information and support from their care providers in order to do so. I knew what I wanted to do.
I wanted to be this kind of birth worker, an advocate, a supporter, one who would explain that there was no ‘golden path’, and never any guarantees but one who would be able to take the time to go through the various options, who would protect a human's right to make the best decisions for themself and their family regardless of whether this slotted nicely into the local protocol or not.
I’m convinced of one thing: where a person makes a decision based on the best available information (and there’s so often just not the robust research evidence I’d like there to be), having been given the widest choice of available options, time to go through the risks and benefits of each of them, and has then consulted with their own intuition, all with support and all without pressure, they invariably make the right decisions for themselves and their babies.
What I hadn’t anticipated was the absolute harm that not facilitating women’s and birthing people's empowered decision making does. I sometimes book clients who are frightened of birth, who have had previous negative experiences, and have been left anxious or with psychological trauma as a result. When we talk this through, trying to unpick it so we can work together to make this time better, this time a healing experience, what comes through again and again is not the clinical side of things, but the absence of control, the feeling of being ‘done to’, of having no voice, no agency, no autonomy during their birthing. People giving birth don’t lose control, they have it taken away and that’s harmful.
I worked for the NHS after qualifying, and I was part of the Yorkshire Storks Independent Midwifery Collective for five years providing ‘team’ midwifery care, and for many more as Yorkshire Independent Midwife taking on my own clients so that I could provide a more personal one-to-one continuity of carer model before deregistering as a midwife in 2023. I still work closely with Hannah at Nest Independent Midwifery: we meet frequently, attend birthings together, share experience and knowledge and keep our emotional wellbeing healthy through the chance to debrief.
I have homebirth experience supporting clients with twin pregnancies, following caesarean sections, with gestational diabetes, with a variety of pre-existing health conditions, where there is prior social services involvement, with first babies, with fifth (and more) babies, with IVF pregnancies, with plans which do not include monitoring of the fetal heart, or which do not include routine vaginal examinations, with previous history of shoulder dystocia, with previous history of postpartum haemorrhage, in birth pools, on dry land, with bigger babies, with pre-existing anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and tocophobia (fear of birth). I have also supported people with some of these complexities to birth in hospital. It’s absolutely always your choice.
I live in Leeds in a Housing Co-operative, have two kids (now grown up) and foster. Life is good.