Happy Birthday Birth Information Update!

It is now eight years since I sent out the first of our Birth Information Update newsletters.

As I love birthdays, I always like to pause and reflect on how far we’ve come. And invite you to sign up for my free monthly newsletter if you haven’t done so already.

Our Birth Information Update came about when I realised that we needed to (re)create independent, midwife-led sources of birth-related research and information. These needed to be midwife-led, thoughtful, positively focused and free of advertising for pharmaceutical drugs, baby milk, technologies, baby products and so on.

I was already looking at lots of research and the latest birth-related information as a part of my ‘day job.’ I write books and, when I began, I was also doing a lot of speaking and consultancy for midwives, doctors, birth folk and others. So I knew that finding the content wouldn’t be a problem.

I decided that I cared enough about this to donate some of my time to the project. I then looked into the running costs, which were a bit more of an issue. Not insurmountable, but we needed a few hundred pounds to set it all up.

A friend said, “why don’t you crowdfund?”

What a great idea!

I sewed a load of little fabric hearts (some of which feature in the picture below) which we exchanged for donations towards the project at conferences and workshops.

And here we are

The first newsletter went out in March 2015.

Eight years on, it still goes out every month, with an occasional summer or Christmas break.

It now reaches many thousands of midwives, doctors, birth folk, women and families in more than 50 countries around the world.

The software and techy side of the project is funded by the sale of velvet vaginas, birthkit purses and other craft stuff, so thank you to everyone who has bought any of those. Many of them have been made on planes and while I’m waiting for my turn to speak at conferences and events.

We sell them on the bookstall that Chris sometimes runs at live events. And now we’ve even got a seasonal Etsy shop so that people can buy my hand made goodies from the other side of the world, or when we were locked down! It’s now open in the few weeks before Christmas each year.

We still donate our time for free. All of the profits go straight into funding the infrastructure which makes the newsletter and our free information stuff possible.

Another great way of supporting our Birth Information Project is by buying one of my books, because this helps me make a living so I can continue donating some of my time for free.

Eight years on, I haven’t lost my passion for independent information, and I’m happier than ever that we began this project. I love that so many people love our newsletter as a way of helping them regularly catch up with my monthly shortlist of the research that is worth knowing about as well as getting a run down of blog posts and our news.