What is the most common thing I say in my birth debriefs?

You did not you - you were failed. There is a difference.

So many women come out of birth feeling like they have failed, or that their body let them down in some way. We have been taught that as women we are designed to birth and it should just happen, right?

Well yes. BUT. In the right circumstances.

We need to feel safe – both physically and emotionally. We need to feel private, and we need to feel unobserved for our physiological birthing hormones to flow so that birth can unfold the way that it was designed to. We need to be surrounded by people that we trust – who we know and who know us, who respect us, and who support us to make our own decisions for what happens to us and our babies.

When we are not supported in the way that we need:

When we don’t have time to form those trusting relationships with our care providers,

When we aren’t given true informed consent where the risks and benefits are detailed,

When we aren’t supported to decline interventions,

When we aren’t supported to move into positions or utilise pain relief options like we had hoped for,

When our concerns are listened to,

When we aren’t treated with respect,

When the care becomes threatening, coercive, or abusive,

When we feel so unsafe that our brain goes into a state of trauma and we physically can’t speak, move, or even think,

This is not your fault.

Maybe you felt the nudge that something wasn’t right, maybe you tried speaking up, and you were overridden, or shamed for asking the question, or maybe years of being taught to trust the experts meant you kept quiet. And do you know what? We SHOULD be able to trust the experts. We should feel safe, supported, and respected in their care. This is not your failing, it is theirs. We should be able to birth without experiencing trauma in our healthcare system.

This is not your failing, it is theirs.

**I want to acknowledge here that true obstetric emergencies do happen – and no-one can plan for this. And sometimes no-one knows why or how. Birth will always carry the element of the wild and unpredictable with it, and there is often no rhyme or reason for it. What I’m referring to here is preventable birth trauma, of which, far too much occurs. But even during an obstetric emergency, you still deserve to be informed and treated with respect throughout. This too, is often a failing of the maternity care system.

If this brings something up for you and would like some support in this, you can find more information on my birth debriefs here.