WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT... Giving birth

Actor Zoe Naylor endured a traumatic labour, and believes Australia’s maternity system needs a major overhaul

The birth of my first child was what the medical system would call “normal” and “good”. Yet it was deeply distressing. I’m an educated, well-resourced woman, but nothing could have prepared me for the experience I had.

The midwife I’d seen throughout my pregnancy wasn’t working when I went into labour, so I ended up with someone different in the hospital. It’s interesting how you can have lots of people in a room and still feel tremendously alone. I was in full-steam labour from the get-go and I didn’t know what was happening to me. It felt like I was holding onto the back of a steam train at full speed. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was largely left to my own devices, I didn’t feel an inherent sense of safety and I tore quite badly. It was so overwhelming that I emerged from that birth in shock. There’s a telling photo where I’m holding Sophia and I just look flabbergasted, like What the fuck just happened?

My experience was reflective of our current maternity system. The system is not set up so that every woman emerges from giving birth feeling physically well and emotionally safe. It’s highly medicalised and is driven by an undercurrent of fear. We start with the idea of what could go wrong rather than what can go right. We use blanket labels: You’re 40? You’re high risk. They don’t serve anyone.

Birth doesn’t happen on the clock. It’s not convenient. You can’t measure it. Indigenous cultures talk about a birth month because they understand it can’t be pinned to the date. Our maternity system has no flexibility, and that’s not the system’s fault; it’s a by-product of decades of unconscious interventions around birth, primarily driven by money and the patriarchy.

We can start to work towards ensuring birth is a physically and emotionally safe experience for all Australian women by implementing a model of continuity when it comes to midwifery care. That would mean having an attentive, attuned midwife who is with you for your pregnancy, the labour and postpartum. The midwives bring a motherly energy, and the relationship with them fosters trust and safety, but they are also highly trained and experienced professionals.

Many women have traumatic births but push it aside as if it doesn’t matter as long as they have their healthy baby. Yet it’s important to have these conversations so that they can potentially change the course for their children and their children’s children. We need to get birth out of the current system and back into more accessible birth centres, and we need to put independent midwifery care on that map as the gold standard. A huge amount of research shows that if a woman has continuity of midwifery care during pregnancy, labour and postpartum, she can do anything.

Her mental health, her physical health – all of it – will be better, and she’s going to thrive as a mother.

The Birth Time platform, co-founded by Naylor, is an education and resource hub for maternity care. The Birth Time film is now screening nationally. For details, visit birthtime.world.