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Active Birth workshops achieve their aims

The feedback from the workshop in Huddersfield indicates that we did achieve our aims of exploring midwifery and active birth in practical terms and bringing midwives together as a unified team. I received this email today from one of the participants:

I am one of the midwives who attended your recent workshop at Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax and I would just like to say an enormous thank you for your wisdom, your humour, your honesty and your insight into birthing women, midwives and midwifery practice. I have had a lovely conversation with a friend who also attended the workshop and it seems everyone involved has been inspired and re-energised in your company. I am now looking forward to sharing your ideas and knowledge with some like-minded friends on maternity leave and am even doing an extra shift tomorrow, for one reason only, and that's to put some of these ideas into practice!

This is wonderful news – if I can inspire any midwives to keep on working in the UK, especially in this time of straightened circumstances, staffing crises and general low morale, then I am more than happy to make the journey here from time to time.

I have now moved on to Ireland again for another workshop for the midwifery students in Limerick. The far-sighted co-ordinator of this program, Margaret Crowley-Murphy, has once again found the means to incorporate the Active Birth workshop into the midwifery syllabus, with the express aim of providing an alternative source of ideas and practical solutions from outside the immediate hospital system and course tutors. I always enjoy working with students – they are enthusiastic, open-minded and eager to look at things from various perspectives.

The issue of the theory/practice divide has already come up and I have pointed out that as students they have a big advantage – they are expected to ask questions. In a system as conventional (read: unwilling to change) as Ireland’s, a student asking questions at least challenges the status quo. Answers have to be found – a current question I would ask is: why are women in Ireland being denied access to waterbirths? These have apparently been banned since an incident in a hospital last year – they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this issue.

In other developed countries there would be outcry at this curtailment of freedom and rights. One of those in the group mentioned that she had personally seen two women in the clinic both of whom had waterbirths elsewhere (Australia, as it happened) and who were being denied a similar service here. One promptly said that she would travel 12,000 miles and go home to get what she wanted – talk about voting with her feet!

Keeping the lid on demands for alternative birth services is managed by denying women basic information about options (pre-natally through the clinics and classes, in the media and elsewhere) so that hopefully they remain ignorant of what goes on in other places and won’t ask awkward questions. The influx of immigrants from many other countries that has occurred over the past few years as a result of the economic boom may well have an unexpected result – women will be demanding levels of care and services they are used to in other developed nations. Perhaps the Irish will then be forced to catch up. I feel sure they will get there eventually.

Posted by andrea at February 21, 2007 06:31 AM