Community Birth Club

12/05/2025

Sing it Daniel!

The MOST important bits of my course is sorting the facts from assumptions and opinions.

For example: Telling a friend or family member you’re planning a homebirth, many of my clients are met with this response..

OPINION - “Why would you do something so risky? It’s much safer to be in hospital”.

FACT - Swathes of data demonstrates that planning a homebirth is not only very safe for parents and babies but shows improved outcomes, reduction in interventions and higher satisfaction levels for parents.

Personally I advocate for not telling people your plans - do you need their opinions and do they need to know?

It’s not just “laypeople” who are capable of passing off opinions as fact. Medics do it too ALL. THE. TIME. (Homebirth = brain damage, Vaginal Examinations are essential, CTG monitoring improves outcomes!?) but that’s a WHOLE other post for another time.

Evidence and data isn’t everything. Your emotional and psychological safety is paramount for birth but sorting fact from fiction is a damn good place to start working that out.

My job is to sign post you to the evidence to help you unlock what safety in birth means to you personally, and help you uncover that gut intuition - trusting that you’ll know what feels best and right for you. 

I’d really love to help, drop me a DM to discuss how we could work together.

27/03/2025

02/10/2024

Another blog post moved to my website!
"Summary: The amniotic sac and fluid play an important role in facilitating physiological birth and protecting the baby. There is no evidence that rupturing this sac will reduce the length of labour. While every intervention has its place, including ARM, care providers need to carefully consider the risks before offering it to women. Also, women must be fully informed of the risks before choosing an ARM during their labour."
https://www.rachelreed.website/blog/amnioticsaclabour

15/06/2024

The error is that the Report allows for procedures to be carried out without consent in the case of an emergency. This contradicts UK law. Given that the APPG who published the Report have asked the Government to implement its suggestions in full, this is desperately concerning.

I contacted the author of the Report, Kim Thomas, CEO of , to request that this error was amended. After seeking legal advice and finding that I was correct, that this recommendation does contradict the law, she still refused to amend the document.

After this, I gathered a team of lawyers, academics, birth activists and birth rights organisations and we wrote a letter to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) who published the document, and requested that they amend it. They have not yet responded.

We are therefore publishing the letter that we wrote, and publicly calling on Kim Thomas and the APPG to update this very serious, and potentially devastating error in their Report.

Letter is in comments.

07/03/2024

During pregnancy, fetal cells migrate out of the womb and into a mother’s heart, liver, lung, kidney, brain, and more. They could shape moms’ health for a lifetime, Katherine J. Wu reports:⁠ https://theatln.tc/EUrn85TO
⁠
The presence of these cells, known as microchimerism, is thought to affect every person who has carried an embryo, even if briefly, and anyone who has ever inhabited a womb. The cross-generational transfers are bidirectional—as fetal cells cross the placenta into maternal tissues, a small number of maternal cells migrate into fetal tissues, where they can persist into adulthood. ⁠
⁠
Genetic swaps, then, might occur several times throughout a life. Some researchers believe that people may be miniature mosaics of many of their relatives, via chains of pregnancy: their older siblings, perhaps, or their maternal grandmother, or any aunts and uncles their grandmother might have conceived before their mother was born. “It’s like you carry your entire family inside of you,” Francisco Úbeda de Torres, an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, told Wu.⁠
⁠
Some scientists have argued that cells so sparse and inconsistent couldn’t possibly have meaningful effects. Even among microchimerism researchers, hypotheses about what these cells do—if anything at all—remain “highly controversial,” Sing Sing Way, an immunologist and a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told Wu. But many experts contend that microchimeric cells aren’t just passive passengers. They are genetically distinct entities. And they might hold sway over many aspects of health: our susceptibility to infectious or autoimmune disease, the success of pregnancies, maybe even behavior. ⁠
⁠
If these cells turn out to be as important as some scientists believe they are, they might be one of the most underappreciated architects of human life, Wu writes.

05/03/2024

We need to start being clearer about the actual risks when it comes to the screening and preventative measures that are offered to pregnant and labouring women.

For instance, data show that the actual chance of mortality from early-onset GBS disease (EOGBS) in the baby of a woman who is healthy and has reached full-term (37 weeks or beyond) is 1 in 39,682 (Bevan et al 2019).

To save anyone asking, these data are based on a U.K. mapping exercise. If you have questions, the reference is below so you can read for yourself. And my book explains the wider evidence too.

We use risk-based screening in the U.K. rather than routine bacteriological screening so these figures include all women, not just those who are known to be carrying GBS bacteria. It is likely that around a quarter to a third of the women in this data set will have had GBS bacteria.

But if we switched to routine culture-based screening, we would need to give antibiotics to between 24,065 and 32,087 women in order to prevent one death from early onset GBS disease.

As these figures show, although GBS disease can occasionally be fatal, it is also rare.

Some babies are far more at risk than others, which is why the U.K. takes a risk-based approach.

The risks of antibiotics include antibiotic resistance, interference with the baby's microbiome, gut problems and allergic reactions.

According to NHS Choices, severe allergic reactions to antibiotics are estimated to occur in between 1 in 2000 and 1 in 10000 cases.

And women who are found to have GBS bacteria often find that their choices are limited by this.

The key is to get better information out there, and to help everyone understand the issues and the evidence relating to the screening and prophylactic measures that are offered to pregnant and labouring women in the hope of preventing early-onset group B strep (EOGBS) disease.

Then everyone can make the decisions that are right for them.

For more info, see http://www.sarawickham.com/gbse

27/02/2024

A lovely obstetrician friend just emailed me from the RCOG Annual Professional Development Conference to let me know that one of their speakers has just shared this quote of mine from What's Right For Me?

Good stuff 😊

When we birth, we don’t just birth babies.

We birth ourselves, we birth our families and we reshape our lives.

It’s so important to get good information on which to base pregnancy and birth decisions.

Because they can affect us for a very long time.

Perhaps the rest of your life.

It's also important to understand that it doesn't matter what the guideline says, or what anyone else thinks.

What matters is what's right for you.

If you'd like to read more from someone who has a PhD, more than twenty five years of experience as a midwife and a holistic, heart-centred approach to birth .... oh, and who doesn't think it's her job to make your decisions, there's loads of free information on my website, https://www.sarawickham.com

You can also read lots more about birth-related decision making in my book: What's Right For Me? Making decisions in pregnancy and childbirth.

More details at https://www.sarawickham.com/me

25/02/2024

During pregnancy, fetal cells migrate out of the womb and into a mother’s heart, liver, lung, kidney, brain, and more. They could shape moms’ health for a lifetime, Katherine J. Wu reports:⁠ https://theatln.tc/W8aBhPp2
⁠
The presence of these cells, known as microchimerism, is thought to affect every person who has carried an embryo, even if briefly, and anyone who has ever inhabited a womb. The cross-generational transfers are bidirectional—as fetal cells cross the placenta into maternal tissues, a small number of maternal cells migrate into fetal tissues, where they can persist into adulthood. ⁠
⁠
Genetic swaps, then, might occur several times throughout a life. Some researchers believe that people may be miniature mosaics of many of their relatives, via chains of pregnancy: their older siblings, perhaps, or their maternal grandmother, or any aunts and uncles their grandmother might have conceived before their mother was born. “It’s like you carry your entire family inside of you,” Francisco Úbeda de Torres, an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, told Wu.⁠
⁠
Some scientists have argued that cells so sparse and inconsistent couldn’t possibly have meaningful effects. Even among microchimerism researchers, hypotheses about what these cells do—if anything at all—remain “highly controversial,” Sing Sing Way, an immunologist and a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told Wu. But many experts contend that microchimeric cells aren’t just passive passengers. They are genetically distinct entities. And they might hold sway over many aspects of health: our susceptibility to infectious or autoimmune disease, the success of pregnancies, maybe even behavior. ⁠
⁠
If these cells turn out to be as important as some scientists believe they are, they might be one of the most underappreciated architects of human life, Wu writes. ⁠
⁠
Read more: https://theatln.tc/W8aBhPp2