Fat vaginas can’t give birth! Being a childbirth educator, I get to hear the best and the worst from my clients of our maternity care system. This seems to be the new thing with obstetricians telling women with higher BMI’s that they can’t give birth vaginally because their vagina is too fat, and babies will...
When I found out I was pregnant I immediately felt partial to having a home birth. I was born at home myself in the early 90s, as were many of my cousins and my brother four years later (which my mum encouraged a very excited me to be present for – my interest in pregnancy...
During the Middle Ages women continued to use natural medicines and holistic care for the wellbeing of their families and pregnant women, while men attended university to become physicians, which then started the restrictions on natural healers who were considered “witches” if they were performing healing without formal accreditation. The Church declared that anyone using...
Obstetricians and GP obstetricians are heading a push for machines that go “ping” to replace midwives. What this means is replacing real and dedicated continuity of care, touch, conversations, connections and experts in normal physiological birth with numbers, machines, computer screens and charts that lead to interventions and caesareans. The well-known skit from Monty Python’s...
A ground-breaking Australian study on effective childbirth education was recently released by Dr. Kate Levett and Dr. Hannah Dahlen (who were also key-note speakers at our annual conference). This study highlighted how important it was to not only participate in independent childbirth education classes but to also find a program that included complementary therapies to...