Yorkshire Doula

04/03/2025

Access Denied – The Reality of Home Birth Restrictions in the UK 📢

Home birth services are being restricted across the UK—disproportionately impacting minoritised and marginalised communities. What’s behind these restrictions? Why does it matter? What can be done?

❗Join Birthrights on March 26 (12–1:30 PM) for the launch of our report, to learn more about these restrictions and their consequences and hear from expert panellists.
Sign up to attend for FREE now via🎫: bit.ly/web_BR

16/02/2025

Are these the worst birth statistics in the UK? Fewer than 20% of women and birthing people gave birth without surgery or instruments?? Since I suspect 80% of their bodies didn’t fail them I figure the systems there did. There is a national scandal in maternity care in this country.

01/10/2024

"The rhombus of Michaelis (sometimes called the quadrilateral of Michaelis) is a kite-shaped area that includes the three lower lumber vertebrae, the sacrum and that long ligament which reaches down from the base of the scull to the sacrum.

This wedge-shaped area of bone moves backwards during the second stage of labour and as it moves back it pushes the wings of the ilea out, increasing the diameters of the pelvis.

We know it’s happening when the woman’s hands reach upwards (to find something to hold onto, her head goes back and her back arches.” (Wickham and Sutton 2002).

Jean Sutton and I first wrote about the rhombus of Michaelis in 2002.

We weren’t the first to notice it.

Midwives from around the world had been aware of it and discussing it for many years.

Some talked about “the opening of the back,” while others described the shape, and discussed it in the same sentence as they talked about purple lines and cold feet.

That is, the embodied wisdom of birth.

Since we wrote about it, many thousands of midwives and birth workers have learned about this physiological feature of birth from our article and the conversations that it has sparked.

The original article is available on my website.

Yes, it’s one of those named by and for a man, and that’s not OK. But if we change the article title then people won’t be able to find it.

I’m re-sharing the link to the article today in the hope of sharing the information more widely.

You can read it at https://www.sarawickham.com/articles-2/the-rhombus-of-michaelis/

I hope you’ll find it useful.

Yes, please feel free to share and repost this social media post, with the pic, words and credit intact.

Thanks to my friends at for letting me reshare their image

23/03/2024

Happy world doula week! Xx

I'm so proud to be part of this wonderful profession.
Doulas work hard every day to enable the families they care for have a better experience of maternity services.

Posted • Happy World Doula Week!

We’re sending hugs to all our doula friends this week, along with a reminder of this Cochrane review, which evidences the effectiveness of the kind of continuous support in labour that doulas can provide.

“Historically, women have generally been attended and supported by other women during labour.

However, in hospitals worldwide, continuous support during labour has often become the exception rather than the routine.” (Bohren et al 2017).

So a team of Cochrane reviewers set out to, “…assess the effects, on women and their babies, of continuous, one‐to‐one intrapartum support compared with usual care, in any setting.”

They looked at the results of 26 trials involving 15,858 women and carried out in 17 different countries.

And the results?

“Continuous support during labour may improve outcomes for women and infants, including increased spontaneous vaginal birth, shorter duration of labour, and decreased caesarean birth, instrumental vaginal birth, use of any analgesia, use of regional analgesia, low five‐minute Apgar score and negative feelings about childbirth experiences.

We found no evidence of harms of continuous labour support.” (Bohren et al 2017).

You can read the full Cochrane review at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6483123/

And if you’re looking for birth information, I have a website and several books that will help you make the decisions that are right for you. Including who you might want with you to support you in labour and help you on your journey.

I'm at www.sarawickham.com

Bohren MA, Hofmeyr GJ, Sakala C et al (2017). Continuous support for women during childbirth. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2017 Jul 6;7(7):CD003766. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD003766.pub6. PMID: 28681500; PMCID: PMC6483123.

06/02/2024

Apparently twitter is alive with people rubbishing the idea of sterile water injections. I’m not sure why. Sterile water injections to help labouring women and people experiencing back-labour have been around for years, are much more commonly used elsewhere in the world and they work. It’s can be a great alternative to pharmacological options for when the back-labour is intense. They can be administered at home or in hospital, work alongside other forms of pain relief, are cheap, simple and have practically no downsides other the initial sting. They’re not for everyone, they don’t do much for the surges, just back labour. But if you’re not offered an option because your caregiver prefers pharmacological treatments, hasn’t heard of them or just has their own prejudices you’re being denied choice. I don’t see anything wrong with people making their own decisions. They need information to be able to do so.

In today's video, we'll learn what sterile water injections are and how they might help to provide pain relief during labor. We'll discuss the evidence on their effectiveness and the latest clinical recommendations from a 2017 systematic review.

23/01/2024

The Optibreech research has not received funding to continue. This work was looking to widen the provision of vaginal breech birth options to more women and birthing people. The RCM is asking what people want funded in terms of research. There’s a link to the RCM in the page below.

The OptiBreech research study closes this month, but we hope to be back again in the future.

20/01/2024

You rights in childbirth in the UK in various languages xx

It’s really important that women and birthing people and those that care for them, understand basic birth rights in maternity care. It is vital that conversations that lead to decisions, start from a shared understanding of what an individual can or can’t choose to do and the obligations on mate...

15/09/2023

This! It’s highly likely that the outcomes for heavier women in childbirth are detrimentally affected by institutional prejudice and caregiver negativity. There’s no good reason not to birth in a pool, to be at increased risk of intervention, to be denied an active birth. And don’t get me started on BMI…

“In late 2019, an obstetrician in Scotland made a rude, untrue, unevidenced, and misogynistic comment during a BBC radio programme which immediately led to other obstetricians and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in the UK speaking out to refute what he had said.

His claim, which I am repeating here only for the sake of anyone who has come across it and believed it, was that one reason for an increase in the caesarean rate is that larger women have increased fat tissue in the birth canal.

In other words, to use the horrible term coined by journalists, ‘fat vaginas’.”

That’s the beginning of a section in my book, ‘Plus Size Pregnancy: what the evidence really says about higher BMI and birth.’

The section is called ‘The myth of the fat vagina’, and I included it because so many people asked me to look at the evidence for this myth.

I did that.

And, as I also wrote in the book, ‘having looked thoroughly at the evidence on this topic, I can confidently assure you that there is no such thing as a ‘fat vagina’.

It’s an incorrect, misogynistic, obstetric myth that has no basis in evidence or real-world experience."

I hope that helps set the record straight.

Visit https://www.sarawickham.com/plus-size-pregnancy/ to find out more.

01/09/2023

I’ve been asked to help establish a group for young parents in Leeds (under 21) but my role will be very background as they want it to be their own. It’s at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550680150474

Please share with anyone who might want to join. Xx

Meet ups, support and information by young parents for young parents in Leeds.

01/09/2023

I once objected when a client was told that refusing vit K for their baby would mean the midwife would “have to” alert the paediatrician on duty “who might” consider that a safeguarding issue. That’s coercion right there, and pointing that out prevented further pressure on my very informed client. It’s your choice, Sara Wickham is one of the few trying to assess evidence and present a balanced view.

Anytime I post about vitamin K being offered to newborn babies, it’s almost guaranteed that it will generate some responses on the extreme ends of the opinion spectrum.

I don’t know why that happens more with vitamin K than some other topics, but it does.

There are people who believe that any parent who questions or declines vitamin K for their newborn baby is irresponsible, under-informed or worse.

I don’t agree with them.

I support healthy questioning of any drug, treatment or intervention. It’s important to be able to weigh up pros and cons and decide if something is right for us or our babies. Many of my books are based on helping parents understand the evidence so they can do that.

Then there are people who believe that vitamin K (or the other substances that some preparations of vitamin K may contain) is a terribly dangerous substance and should never be given to a baby.

I don’t agree with them either.

All medications and interventions have risks and downsides as well as benefits. But in some situations, for some people, the benefits outweigh the possible downsides.

That’s up to them to decide.

And, as I wrote in my book ‘Vitamin K and the Newborn,’ there often aren’t clear-cut, black-and-white, all-or-nothing answers.

Often, it’s more complicated than that. The answer lies in between the extremes. It’s nuanced, and sometimes it depends.

I realise there’s an irony in my posting this on social media, but sometimes we need to get away from the extreme-focused viewpoints that often exist on social media, so we can understand issues that deserve more than a shouty sentence or two.

If you’d like to find out more about vitamin K, I have an information hub of free resources and a book on this topic. You can find links to both at www.sarawickham.com/vk

Yes, you can share/repost as long as you keep the original pic, text and credit intact. Please do not put Sara’s work/words into your own branding.

12/07/2023

Doula travels take me to some beautiful parts of Yorkshire. Here, visiting a client