Category: Original articles

Eight things I’d like to share with midwifery students who care…

Sara Wickham offers some words of support and advice for midwifery students.

I first published a version of this post on bedlessness in 2013. I had received quite a few positive comments on a post about being womanside and was also spurred on by conversations about how midwives and birth folk can…

In the first part of this article, I looked at how and why people come to take a medical-model approach to birth, and argued that there is much to be gained from understanding how cultural influences, medical education and the…

How to train your obstetrician – part 1

Dear esteemed obstetric colleagues: before you write in and complain, please let me tell you that not only has this post been approved by some of my favourite obstetricians, it was actually commissioned and titled by one of them. It…

Brought to you by my friend and colleague Tara Windmill-Robson of Mindful Midwifery, I have awesome placenta pictures to share today! But this isn’t only about show and tell; neither of us have seen a placenta quite like this one…

Ask any midwife, doctor or birthworker what three things they wish they could tell all women, and you’ll probably get three statements that tell you as much about the writer’s passion and beliefs as about birth. My list is no…

Researching and writing a book is always a sure-fire means of generating a list of interesting things that one might want to look into one day, and my recent Group B Strep project didn’t let me down in this regard! …

Inspired by conversations I’ve had with people on my facebook page and elsewhere about research showing that there is no difference in blood gases measured in blood taken before and after clamping the umbilical cord, and in the spirit of…

I am a big fan of Archie Cochrane, who said many wise things in his lifetime. One of them has become known as Cochrane’s aphorism, and I wanted to mention this as a brief addendum to the page on my…

One of the presentations that I most like to be asked to give is called ‘Cervical Wisdom‘. This is a session that I have developed over the years in which I analyse the things that textbooks and received wisdom would…