I am a birth doula and photographer attending home births, hospital births and births and birthing centres.
I also work with women and families offering maternity, birth, newborn and family photos in NOR Perth area.
19/11/2025
The standard method for closing the uterus after cesarean delivery, used for over 50 years, may be causing a host of long-term health issues for millions of women.
According to Dr. Emmanuel Bujold and Dr. Roberto Romero, leaders in obstetrics and gynecology, current closure practices—where sutures join the uterine lining with surrounding muscle—fail to restore the uterus’s natural structure, leading to serious complications.
Their exhaustive review reveals the risks: abnormal placenta attachment affects up to 6% of women, uterine rupture up to 3%, and premature births up to 28%. Many suffer pelvic pain (up to 35%), excessive bleeding (up to 33%), and endometriosis or adenomyosis (up to 43%). Such complications are linked directly to the scarring produced by the conventional closure method.
Bujold and Romero propose a nuanced technique: suturing tissues only of the same type, carefully reconstructing the muscle layer while leaving the uterine lining untouched for natural regeneration. Although this new method takes 5–8 minutes—twice as long as the traditional approach—the additional blood loss is minimal and outweighed by better outcomes for future reproductive health.
With cesarean rates rising globally, especially in countries like Canada where 27% of births are by C-section, prioritizing meticulous uterine repair is a critical public health concern. This shift in surgical thinking may help millions experience safer subsequent pregnancies and better long-term well-being.
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📄 RESEARCH PAPER
📌 Emmanuel Bujold et al, "Uterine closure after cesarean delivery: surgical principles, biological rationale, and clinical implications", American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (2025)
17/11/2025
Health ministers are furious with a letter from the prime minister demanding they rein in spending if they want a public hospital funding deal honoured.
When Women Die in Childbirth, Blame Fails Us. Listening Might Save Lives.
The recent tragic deaths of several Australian women and babies following freebirths have rightly ignited grief and concern across the nation. Any maternal or neonatal death is heartbreaking, and communities affected by these losses deserve compassion and support.
However, calls to criminalise doulas or restrict freebirth represent a deeply troubling response. They threaten to undermine women’s reproductive autonomy, fail to address the systemic drivers pushing some women away from mainstream maternity care, and risk repeating a historic pattern: when women suffer, the instinct is to police them rather than listen to them.
Women’s Autonomy Is Not Optional
Whether one agrees with freebirth or not is immaterial. At the heart of this issue lies a fundamental principle: women have the right to bodily autonomy. This includes the right to decide where, how, and with whom they give birth. Restricting this right leads us onto dangerous ground, eroding sexual and reproductive health and rights enshrined in international law, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
Attempts to limit women’s legal rights around childbirth should alarm us all. History teaches that reproductive control rarely stops at one point of intervention.
The Difficult Question Too Few Are Asking: Why?
Critics have rushed to blame social media influencers and so-called “birth keepers” for these deaths. This simplistic narrative dismisses the real motivations driving women’s decisions and insults their intelligence. Women do not reject the healthcare system on a whim; they do so because, in their experiences or in the experiences of those they trust, it has already rejected them.
Each year about 300,000 women give birth in Australia. Approximately 97 percent do so in hospital; around 1.8 percent in birth centres; and 0.3 percent at home, mostly through regulated midwifery models. Freebirth accounts for a tiny fraction of births. There is no evidence of a sudden surge; what has increased is public attention.
What also continues to rise is birth trauma. One in three women in Australia report their birth as traumatic, and around 10 percent develop symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. This is not fringe rhetoric. These figures come from large-scale Australian research and government-commissioned reports.
We also operate in a highly medicalised maternity environment. Induction rates for first-time mothers are close to 50 percent, and caesarean births approach 40 percent. This escalation in intervention has not corresponded with improved clinical outcomes, but it has contributed to increasing morbidity and psychological distress.
Associate Professor Vinay Rane recently noted that hospitals “can feel quite clinical and too bright, too busy,” and must work to become more inclusive and accessible. This understatement gestures toward a far deeper truth: women are telling us they do not always feel safe, respected, or seen in our maternity system. Dismissing that reality drives them further away.
Doulas Are Not the Problem
Doulas have become convenient scapegoats in this debate. In reality, they are trained providers of emotional, physical, and informational support. They do not perform clinical tasks or replace midwives or doctors. Decades of international and Australian evidence show that continuous non-clinical labour support reduces intervention rates, caesarean births, instrumental delivery, epidural use, and improves maternal emotional outcomes.
In a system where fewer than 10 percent of Australian women receive continuity of midwifery care, doulas fill a vital gap. Restricting them would remove one of the few evidence-based supports women can reliably access.
What Women Are Telling Us
Women are not turning away from maternity services because they are naïve or reckless. They are turning away because they are frightened of being silenced, coerced, disrespected, or traumatised.
Women tell us this in surveys, inquiries, patient complaints, advocacy forums, and public submissions. Silencing them will not make them safer. Listening to them might.
The Real Work Ahead
If we want to prevent further tragedies, we must move beyond regulation and toward reform:
• Expand access to continuity-of-midwifery-care models
• Embed trauma-informed, culturally safe care across all services
• Strengthen community-based childbirth education
• Protect and integrate doulas into collaborative maternity care pathways
• Address systemic obstetric violence, coercion, and racism
• Centre women’s experiences in policy, practice, and evaluation
The Bottom Line
Doulas are not to blame. Women are not to blame. The system has been broken for decades and women are simply doing whatever they can to ensure that they birth surrounded by people who will protect them and care for them throughout one of life’s most vulnerable moments. It is time to turn the spotlight on the real culprit: our maternity care system. Fixing it is not optional; it is overdue. Women deserve safety, dignity, and respect in childbirth, and they will keep seeking it wherever they can find it.
there was a time they called childbirth the
“knock ‘em out, drag ‘em out” era. can you image ?
mothers weren’t given a choice.
they were drugged into twilight sleep
morphine to dull the pain.
scopolamine to erase the memory.
they were strapped into padded beds.
blindfolded. ears stuffed.
sometimes bound in straight-jacket-like shirts
so they wouldn’t move while giving birth.
the neighbors could hear them screaming.
and when it was over,
many mothers didn’t even remember if the baby was theirs.
this is the history we come from.
a history where women were silenced,
where control over our bodies was stripped away.
and yet, even then
when they woke to a baby in their arms,
their bodies still made milk.
still created the perfect food,
drop by drop, cell by cell,
as if to say:
“you took everything from me,
but you cannot take this.”
mama, never doubt the power you hold.
breastfeeding is resistance.
it is survival.
it is legacy.
share this to remind the world
how far we’ve come
and why we should never stop fighting for birth and breastfeeding freedom.
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I believe the perfect birth is completely possible but it is different for every Mum. We all come from different walks of life and with those life experiences come different expectations.
I also am a firm believer in the idea that “it takes a village”. Having doula is really great way of helping add to your community of support.
Your Doula is your sounding board, your place to vent, laugh about awkward bodily functions, and cry when your hormones are surging through you. I never tire of talking about your pregnancy, birth, babies, so you need never worry you are boring me. There is no need to put “sorry TMI” in front of any query, or statement as I am happy to discuss anything you need, and most likely you are not the first to ask!
My appointments with you will be as long as you need to discuss everything and ask your questions and have a cup of tea. And I am always available outside of these appointments to chat, text or email if we didn’t quite cover everything or baby brain just simply made you forget what you were going to ask.
I alongside your partner are your constant in the flurry of nurses, midwives, doctors, and specialists. Never will I replace your Partner but only be a guiding hand for them to be more involved and to show how they can support you further. I am there to give them a p*e break, food break or just a breather before they become a Parent! I will massage you, jiggle you, wipe your brow and offer a drink. Each birth is exciting, exhilarating, and new! Your birth no matter how many I have attended is SPECIAL to me!
When your baby is born and you’re back comfy and cozy in your home, and all eyes are on this beautiful bubs, your Doula is still looking at you. A magical transition becoming a Mum is but we still need you to feel taken care of, heard, fed, bathed and not so sleep deprived.
I still want to hear about your birth experience, your questions, your fears and pleasure in your new role. I still want to help you create your village.
I always knew I wanted to work in this field as I literally grew up surrounded by birth and babies. My mother was an RN in the NICU and my grade 9 day or “take your kid to work day” was spent in the both the NICU doing rounds, and in the OR witnessing my first cesarean section. It took me a few years to figure out what kind of role I wanted to play in working with pregnant and birthing Mums but it was in 2005 when a friend had her first baby she told me about this amazing woman who she had hired to help her through her birth and she was called a Doula and that’s when I knew I found what I wanted.
I worked as a Disability Support worker for 7 years in Canada mostly working with duel diagnosis and Autistic teens, and young adults. I enjoyed my job very much, but after moving across country did not find a similar program that I felt as passionate about.
I then began working for a Doctor’s office as the nurse receptionist for a GP, a delivering GP and a Breast feeding specialist. I learned a great deal at that office working with dozens of pregnant and post natal Mums. It was while on my maternity leave following that year that I was finally able to take my Doula training.
I have since started taking photography courses and updating my equipment to take better photos for you at your birth and have now started newborn photography for my clients as well.
I am now living in Perth Western Australia with my Aussie husband Luke and our three beautiful children.
I became a Doula in November 2013 and trained with DONA international in Edmonton, Alberta.
