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…
The stork is well loved as an image associated with birth and midwives; a good number of midwifery practices in the English-speaking world feature the word in their name, and images of the birds often appear on logos and web…
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…
When I first wrote the article that this blog post is based upon, I had just finished reading a superb book, The Tyranny of Numbers by economist David Boyle (2001). In it, he critiqued our society’s reliance on and obsession…
A study has looked at birthing outcomes of 323 women who used castor oil as part of an attempt to induce their labour, with interesting results. The study was carried out in the US where, in contrast to countries like…
I’ve been really amazed by the number of people who have been in touch to thank me for the two-part article that I have shared over the past few weeks about the evidence for rebozo use. (You can read part…
A recent study has added to our knowledge about the views and skills of midwives who have expertise in protecting women’s perineums during birth. The research, known as the ‘MEPPI study’ is described as a qualitative exploratory study and the…