17/08/2025
Content warning: birth trauma
Four and a half years ago I attended a full day workshop with Catherine Bell, the creator of The Birth Map. I was drowning and looking for something to cling on to.
Let me explain.
A mother of 2 by then, I had been a midwife for just 3 years after 5 gruelling years of study, and I was already considering leaving the profession.
Can you imagine? Pouring your heart, soul, energy and money into a profession for so long, only to quickly realise "This is not what I signed up for. What fresh hell is this?"
I went into midwifery, transformed by own initiation into Motherhood, to walk side by side women and help them embrace their power and strength through the matrescence journey- pregnancy, birth and postpartum.
My real experience in those first few years was a nasty shock to the system. Anxiety was through the roof. There were days driving to the hospital I fantasised about having an accident- that would likely be better than attending another shift. One day I had to leave my birth suite shift before it even began because my bowels had opened involuntarily on the way in.
We called it gastro, but I knew it was just my body completely unable to cope with the stress. The worst thing about sh****ng myself that day? I was stoked. I could avoid yet another 8 hours of constant hypervigilance, sympathetically charged, walking the tightrope between being a 'good midwife' and making sure women complied with policy, and advocating for women and putting them at the centre of their care.
It was an impossible task and I was wrecked.
Another midwife who sadly no longer practices described her experience as "Holding the woman's hand while the system traumatised her". I couldn't relate more, and it was a confronting realisation.
I felt as worn out and worn down as many of the women I struggled to care and advocate for in the fragmented, medicalised maternity system I operated within. I felt like a cog in a wheel in a machine: a machine that took women in, often fearful but hopeful and trusting The System to know what was best for them, chewed them up in a whirlwind of policy, procedure and dehumanising, disrespectful, institution-centred 'care' and spat them out- 1 in 3 feeling traumatised, 1 in 10 experiencing obstetric violence, and many more feeling bewildered, confused about what the f had just happened- and the worst, the absolute worst- disempowered. Confidence broken. And then the gaslighting. "At least you and your baby are alive."
I didn't know how I could go on supporting such a broken system.
That day with Catherine was my first lifeline. It gave ME a map out of my own spiralling depression and sense of helplessness. I realised I wasn't alone in demanding better for our women. Other people were agitating, getting loud, forging new modalities and ways of doing things to support women's rights to a positive, holistic, safe, informed, empowering matrescence journey.
It was the start of my path to becoming a Hypnobirthing Australia Hypnobirthing Practitioner and helping women understand and embody this truth with their actions:
Women have RIGHTS in childbirth, as in life. They have CHOICES, and those choices can be truly INFORMED. These choices are actually THEIRS to make- and theirs alone.
And when a woman has had the opportunity to make those informed decisions, AND those decisions are heard and RESPECTED, we have the recipe for a positive birth experience, unmarred by trauma- regardless of how her baby is born on the day.
So thank you Catherine Ball, Birth Cartographer, for giving us an invaluable resource- so much so that I gift it to all my birth preparation clients. Thank you for giving us a map to guide us all.
