The Herstory of Midwifery, Reclaiming Midwifery Expertise and Rights of Protection with Dr Rachel Reed

In this episode of Pregnancy, Birth & Beyond, Annalee Atia speaks with Dr Rachel Reed about the history and her story of midwifery and its evolution to the modern day midwife, UK & Australian differences in practice and care both in Midwifery and maternity care and the call for midwives to reclaim their expertise and rights of protection.

“Instead of locating all of the risks in the women and all our job is to identify how wrong her body is and to fix it, how about looking at what we’re doing and how that may or may not influence how her body functions and her experience of birth.”

Dr Rachel Reed is a midwife, academic, author, and international speaker who focuses on childbirth physiology, midwifery practice, and women’s rights (and rites). She has provided midwifery care for many women and has attended births in a wide range of settings and circumstances. Rachel is the author of the award-winning blog MidwifeThinking and the co-host of The Midwives' Cauldron podcast. She has published widely in journals and magazines, and her first book Why Induction Matters is a popular resource for women and care providers. Her most recent book Reclaiming Childbirth as a Rite of Passage: weaving ancient wisdom with modern knowledge will be published early 2021.

Her blog MidwifeThinking has been accessed by over 5 million readers from every country in the world. It currently has over 10,000 subscribers and around 1000 visitors per day; and is archived by Pandora (National Library of Australia and Partners). Posts have been translated into a number of languages including French, Russian, German and Spanish; and a number of posts have been published in magazines.
In 2019 MidwifeThinking was awarded the International Maternity Expo – Practice Innovation Award for an ‘outstanding contribution to maternity and midwifery services’.
Access MidwifeThinking here: https://midwifethinking.com

Further information about Rachel and her work is available at www.rachel-reed.website

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Produced, edited and presented by Annalee Atia

The Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond show is part of a wider nonprofit community media and journalism project, PBB Media.

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