I am a midwife, birth educator, Birth Rewind practitioner and fairly relentless advocate for women.

For 16 years I have worked alongside women through pregnancy, birth and the aftermath of birth.

I have worked in community midwifery, home birth, birth centres and continuity of care teams, as well as leading maternity teams and specialist work supporting women following difficult and traumatic births.

I have seen birth at its most extraordinary.

I have also seen what happens when women feel frightened, unheard or swept along by a system that does not always have enough time to stop and ask:

What does this woman actually need?

That question has shaped almost everything I do now.

Why The Alternative Midwife?

Women are not checklists and birth is not a production line.

I wanted to create the kind of space that can be difficult to find in modern maternity care.

Time.

Time to understand how birth works. To ask the awkward questions. To look properly at your choices. To change your mind. To tell the whole birth story afterwards. To say that something did not feel right, even when everyone else thinks it was.

The Alternative Midwife is not about telling women how they should give birth.

I am interested in something much more important than that.

What matters to you?

My role is to bring the midwifery knowledge, evidence and experience. Yours is to remain the expert on you.

That means honest conversations. Genuine choice. Consent that actually means something. Support that recognises that a healthy baby matters enormously, but so does the woman who gave birth to them.

Beyond the 1:1

My work has increasingly taken me beyond individual birth support and into something bigger: how we talk about birth in the first place.

I am fascinated by women's stories. The things we were told. The things nobody told us. What we wish we had known. What we would tell another woman now.

That is where Let's Talk About Birth began.

It is a growing storytelling project bringing women's voices, lived experiences and wisdom back into the conversation around birth.

Birth is not simply a medical event.

It is physical. Emotional. Cultural. Political. Messy. Powerful. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes brutal.

It can shape us long after it is over.

I think we should talk about that more.

A little bit of me

I am also a mother, writer-in-progress, lover of the sea, big conversations and women who ask difficult questions.

My own experiences of motherhood, womanhood, health and change have probably taught me as much about listening as my professional life has.

I do not believe there is one right way to birth, mother or be a woman.

I do believe you should be allowed to find your way.

Gemma x