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Midwife Experiences
The Baby on the Fire Escape – A Review
From the captivating cover art, ‘Mother and Child’ by Alice Neel, to the community of ‘mothers and others’ in Julie Phillips acknowledgments at the end of the book, this text reverberates with honest reflections of artists as mothers, mothers as artists, that will resonate with anyone combining work and mothering.
This Is Going to Hurt – and it certainly does
Guest Post by Paula Cleary – I decided to watch ‘This is Going to Hurt’ on BBC iPlayer to try and see if there was anything I could find sympathetic about the protagonist. Unless you’ve witnessed birth from various angles you might be forgiven for thinking “This is going to hurt” is an accurate representation of normality. And that’s because it IS. One kind of reality, anyway.
Why Mandating Vaccines is Wrong for Midwives and Everyone
Do vaccine mandates breach the NMC Code?Saturday 22nd January 2022 saw large demonstrations of NHS staff and supporters, including midwives, through London and many towns and cities throughout Britain. Demonstrators were demanding the scrapping of vaccine mandates....
The Threat of Social Services in Maternity Care
Written by Georgia Clancy The management and communication of risk in pregnancy and birth is a complex issue for both women and their maternity care providers, feeding into the choices they have and the decisions they make. The normalisation of the medical model of...
Routine Induction at 41 weeks – the end of watchful waiting?
“Women should be offered induced labour earlier than previously advised to make birth safer for them and their babies, according to draft guidelines published by NICE today (25 May 2021). The updated recommendations strengthen previous advice in the light of new...
Better Births Five Years on
I’m old enough to remember Changing Childbirth five, ten and even fifteen years on (now it’s 28 years – how did that happen?) And now it is Better Births five years on. The two Reports had the same visionary leader, Baroness Julia Cumberlege, who can be proud of what...
Lessons in Appreciation
I am sure I am not the only midwife who has found themselves desperately trying to look patient, while observing a newborn babies first nappy change. It's hard to enjoy the special moment unfolding before you when you are twelve minutes in and you did not even have...
Moral Injury – an Introduction for midwives
* trigger warning – birth trauma/abuse * The concept of ‘moral injury’ in midwifery is being recognised at last. Here, we repost in full an article by Lynn Genevieve originally published in our magazine, Midwifery Matters in Summer 2019. Lynn introduces a concept...
Don’t Give up
My journey in midwifery has not been a linear conventional one. In fact I am totally amazed that I’m still a midwife and actually have a contract working in the NHS. But I’m an intersectional feminist birth activist, so giving up was never really going to happen was...
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