A reflection on Lucy Jones' Matrescence, pregnancy as a profound developmental transition, symbolism of the eel, and why our language should honour both the unique experience of pregnancy and the many ways people become parents.

Half of all babies born in English NHS hospitals now are extracted via caesarean section. Yet stillbirth and neonatal mortality rates have not improved at the same pace. Rising intervention rates are usually explained through clinical factors: workforce shortages, litigation, changing risk thresholds, but the data misses powerful currents. This piece looks at what fear, trauma, loss of trust and the systematic withdrawal of continuity of care are actually doing to birth choices, and what would genuinely change things.

On why yoga nidrā is especially powerful for birth trauma, and how a personalised practice following a birth reflection session can extend healing long after the conversation ends.

Birth trauma isn’t just a memory, it’s an incomplete biological response, held in the nervous system long after the event has passed. Drawing on Somatic Experiencing, the latest neuroscience and Rachel Reed's framework of birth as a rite of passage, this post explores why healing involves more than telling the story, and what it means to restore flexibility to a system frozen in prediction.

How years of NHS midwifery, yoga teaching and somatic practice shaped my understanding of birth trauma as a nervous system response, and what that means for the way healing work is offered.

Michel Odent, obstetrician, birth pioneer and author, talks to Oli about oxytocin, the future of physiological birth, and why what happens in the first hour after birth matters more than we think.

Why do some people feel deeply traumatised after clinically straightforward births, while others feel empowered after complex ones? One of the most consistent answers is consent, not as a legal formality, but as a felt experience in the body.

Flashbacks, hypervigilance, numbness, shame aren't signs of weakness, or anything to be ‘got over’ or pushed aside. They're intelligent survival responses that have got stuck. Understanding the biology can be the beginning of self-compassion.

"But your baby is healthy." "At least you're both okay." These responses, however well-meaning, can deepen shame and delay healing. This piece explores why birth trauma so often goes unrecognised, and why that needs to change.

On International Day of the Midwife, a tribute to Mary Cronk and an honest account of what midwifery is, what it is for, and what is being lost. UK has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, a caesarean section rate of 43.4% and rising, and a midwifery workforce in crisis. This is what happens when relational, continuous, skilled care is systematically withdrawn.

Published to mark the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM, 6 February. Joy Clarke has been a midwife since 1975. She set up one of the UK's first specialist FGM clinics, was nominated for innovative practice by the Commission for Health Improvement, and has spent fifty years refusing to look away from injustice. She talks to Oli about bullying, advocacy, homebirth, racism in midwifery, and what it actually means to be a radical midwife.

This is my CV in story form, a personal account of the people, places, experiences and ideas that have shaped my journey into midwifery, birth reflection and trauma-informed practice.

The RCM's normal birth campaign didn't end midwives' commitment to physiological birth. This is a robust, evidence-based defence of why supporting normal birth matters, written in response to a wave of misinformation in the press and a campaign to discredit the very concept of physiological birth.

A ruptured vertebral disc, spinal surgery, and a forced pause from midwifery and teaching. Out of that came a deepened encounter with yoga nidrā, and a discovery of what radical rest can actually do. A personal account of practice, pain, and finding something on the other side of it.

A week spent on call at Johann Goethe University's maternity unit in Frankfurt, one of the few centres in the world where physiological vaginal breech birth is practiced as routine. Five breech births, a busman's holiday, and a lot of questions about when to wait and when to help.

Notes from the IV International Conference on Humanization of Childbirth in Brasilia, 2016, where a grassroots movement was shifting Brazilian maternity care from technocratic toward humanistic. A post still in progress.

Originally written in 2014 in response to the Adelir case, this piece explores obstetric violence in Brazil, the international outcry it provoked, and what the push for humanized birth was trying to build in its place.

Originally written in 2014 in response to the Adelir case, this piece explores obstetric violence in Brazil, the international outcry it provoked, and what the push for humanized birth was trying to build in its place.

Starting from the Stanford rape trial and a survivor's impact statement, this piece draws a line between sexual violence, bodily autonomy, and the treatment of women in birth. A feminist analysis of what it means to have your body overridden, and why maternity care is not separate from that conversation.

Legendary midwife Mary Cronk wrote a letter to her sisters in midwifery asking what has really changed in the language of birth. Reproduced here at her request, with a transcript, for everyone who has ever had their autonomy reframed as a risk.