A social justice approach to maternity care World leaders have committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals aimed at ending poverty, fighting inequality, protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity, peace and justice. UN Women has identified that achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment is integral to each of the 17 goals. Only by ensuring the rights
Getting your first birth right MHM believes it is very important for childbearing women to receive safe, evidenced based, respectful maternity care so as to have healthy, strong and confident mothers. What poorer start to life for the baby than an unwell mother. Healthy, strong and confident mothers give a baby the best start influencing
The Myth of Women’s Choices in U.S. Maternity Care Nancy K. Lowe, Editor Article first published online: 9 OCT 2015 The Editorial in the JOGNN discusses the two side of the maternity care debate. While the article is focussed on the US health system, it provides a balanced discussion. Two perspectives are discussed: One is the
Food for thought – in more ways then one. An article appeared in The Conversation in November 2016. The article is below. On reading it, I wondered if the similar bias in research is impacting on maternity care and the rising use of infant formula and what is the impact on the future health of women and
Five tips to get real maternity care reform An article in The Conversation – Five tips to get the government started on real health reform – July 22, 2016; provides insightful options that must be included in the National Maternity Services Framework. In summary the five tips focused on maternity care are: Put women must be the centre of
It is all about relationship – Informed Decisions and Consent in Maternity “The right to informed consent is a fundamental principle of medical ethics and human rights law and is particularly relevant to the provision of medical treatment. In addition, our common law starts from the premise that every human body is inviolate and cannot
Why is it so? That mothers and babies are not benefiting from current pregnancy care? To understand this problem it is necessary to understand the recent history of birthing in Australia. In the early twentieth century, the majority of women gave birth at home. Today 95% of birth is in hospitals. Infant and maternal mortality
Fearing birth is one thing we should leave back in the Middle Ages. Hannah Dahlen August 5, 2016 2:01pm The reality is that Australia has one of the highest rates of intervention in birth and this is not leading to better outcomes. The comments I make come from 26 years working as a midwife and over
How do we understand the effects and impacts? We don’t! March 18, 2016 No Comments Do you know in Australia, with the exception of indigenous populations, there has been no major improvement in maternal mortality over the past 10 years even given the high level of interventions during pregnancy and birth. Yet the burden of maternal
The ‘doctor knows best’ culture that still dominates our maternity wards not only infantalises women, it is downright dangerous to the health of mothers and babies. Time and time again, when a mother’s instincts are jettisoned, it ends in disaster. We’ve seen this clearly in Bacchus Marsh. While there is still much to be revealed
