Give Birth like a Feminist

This week is the last episode of series 1, and I’m thrilled to be speaking to Patricia Cordeiro.  Patricia is a mother of two boys, a journalist, a writer, and a doula. She has been an activist for the birth movement in Brazil since 2013,  and participated in the group that stood up for Adelir Carmen in 2014, when Adelir was forced to have a c-section for the birth of one of her daughters. It was at this time that myself and Patricia connected, when she translated Adelir’s first hand account of her court ordered caesarean for me, so that I could write about it in the British press. Nowadays, Patricia works in international communication, promoting gender equality and human rights among other topics.

This week I’m talking to Dr Alice Keely, a specialist midwife with 15 years of experience who is passionate about supporting plus size pregnant women. Between 25 and 50% of women fall into the category of having a ‘high BMI’, putting them on the back foot in a system that already focuses excessively and unnecessarily on risk, causing, she says, even more rules and restrictions, anxiety and stigma.

On this week’s episode I talk to Kim Thomas, CEO of the Birth Trauma Association, about birth trauma and the really vital topic of consent in the birth room. Kim is also a journalist and has written two books about birth trauma and postnatal PTSD.

In this episode I’m speaking to midwife and hypnobirthing expert Maureen Collins. When I was writing and researching Give Birth like a Feminist back in 2018, I spoke to Maureen, who at the time was Head of Midwifery for One to One Midwives, a service that since 2010 had offered a caseloading midwifery model – this basically means when women are cared for by a midwife they get to know and trust – in the North West of England and Essex. This One to One service was free to women under the NHS, and, as you’ll hear in the podcast, they had the most fantastic outcomes for women and babies, with an exemplary safety record AND numbers of straightforward vaginal births at home AND in hospital WAY higher than the national average.

In spite of these incredible statistics, back in 2018 Maureen told me that she felt One to One were seen as ‘mavericks’ and that much of her time was being spent trying to protect her midwives and One to One itself from criticism and, at worst, from being closed down.

At the time she said to me: “There is excessive scrutiny, and no attention paid to our outcomes. If people cared about outcomes, our service would be rolled out across the country. Instead we are constantly under threat.”

And we talked about other, similar models of care, like the famous Albany practice in London, that, in spite of incredible outcomes, had already been closed down. And then – in 2019 – Maureen’s fears were realised, when One to One was also closed. So, I wanted to catch up with Maureen, and find out more about what happened, and why these woman centred services keep being lost.

In this episode I talk to Mara Ricoy Olariaga also known as Matriactivista, a birth educator, activist, radical feminist, poet, writer and medical interpreter.

Mara founded the global movement against obstetric violence known as The Roses Revolution, and has published 3 books in Spanish about feminism, birth and its representation in media and movies. She is also a mother of three children, and the lead in Sexual and Reproductive Rights for the feminist organisation FiLiA.