My Experience

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My Experience *

I have 3 years of experience of birth work within the system as a student midwife. During this time, I attended over 60 births. I have also graduated from the Radical Birth Keeper School run by Freebirth Society and I am a current student of their Matribirth Midwifery Institute.

 At the end of my midwifery degree, however, I declined to sign onto the register. This means that I cannot work as a midwife, and there are many layers to this decision that I made.

 However, put simply, within the overworked system, I never felt like I had enough time or internal resources to provide the support for women that drew me to midwifery in the first place. I studied midwifery as I wanted to learn to be ‘with woman’ (the literal definition of midwife), but I ended up being taught pathologisation of birth. I witnessed so many women complain about how the system failed them and saw the repercussions of this leading to birth trauma. I knew that by contributing to the working of this system I would be going against my nature and would be forced to do things that I fundamentally disagreed with – pulling me out of integrity with myself, not to mention being an active part in creating birth trauma by nature of being in the system (even albeit unintentionally). This training taught me how I don’t want to work - my current journey is discovering how I do!

Birth is such a deeply spiritual process, which is simply not possible to truly honour within a medical system that has removed spirituality. Whilst I understand that sovereign birth outside the medical system is not for everyone – if this is what you dream of – know that this is available to you and is your birth rite as a woman.  Birth the way it was done for centuries before industrialisation is somewhat rare in today’s age, and the decision to follow this ancestral lineage of the women who came before us can be a lonely one. You do not have to walk alone. I would be honoured to walk with you.

Women know birth, and you are no exception.