A systematic review and meta-analysis has further confirmed the safety of home birth for healthy women, even if they are having their first baby. After comparing data from births planned at home birth, in birth centres and in hospital, researchers…
A study published in Women and Birth has offered further insight into the knowledge and skills used by expert midwives in keeping women’s perineums intact during birth. Led by Cecily Begley, the researchers interviewed midwives in New Zealand and Ireland…
It feels rather fitting to have spotted this new systematic review and meta-analysis in the same week that we are running our Group B Strep Explored online course! Freely availably in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, the paper by Bell et…
This month has seen the publication of a study which is really important to women, midwives and everybody involved in maternity care, because it looks even more deeply at a really vital question: what it is that women value in…
A research study which described and explored women’s ‘gut instincts’ during pregnancy has provided further support for the idea that it is vital to listen to women and to pay attention to other ways of knowing such as intuition (Warland…
A paper published in an Australian midwifery journal has proposed a woman-centred framework for documentation and communication when women decide to decline aspects of maternity care. This is an important issue, as the authors note in the background to their…
“Four centuries ago, the Catholic Church declared heliocentrism to be heretical, banned all heliocentric books, and ordered Galileo to refrain from holding, teaching, or defending heliocentric ideas. A similar effort is taking place today. It seeks to suppress debate over…
Two senior doctors have written to the British Medical Journal to commend them for publishing a recent debate which highlights the way “in which the doctors supporting monitoring seem to cherry pick evidence” (Bewley and Braillon 2018). During this debate,…
Since I got back from our latest trip, I’ve been catching up with the research, blog posts and thinking that went on while we were away, and I found so many interesting things that I decided to write a summary…
The results of two recent research studies have added to our knowledge about the benefits of water for labour and birth. The first, a Swedish comparative study by Ulfsdottir et al (2017), found that women giving birth in water had…