Gemma Clifford, experienced midwife, birth educator and Birth Rewind Practitioner at The Alternative Midwife.

Work With Me

Birth is enormous.

You can prepare, make plans and still find yourself with questions you never expected to ask.

You might want to understand birth and your choices. Plans might suddenly change. Or birth might be over, but you are still carrying it.

That is where I come in.

I offer one-to-one midwife-led support before birth, when plans change and afterwards.

No judgement. No agenda. No telling you what you should do or how you should feel.

Just time, experience, evidence and honest conversation.

Because birth matters. And so do you.

Not another antenatal class.

This is one-to-one time to actually understand birth, ask the questions you might not want to ask in a room full of people, talk through your choices and work out what matters to you.

Physiology. Hormones. Pain. Intervention. Induction. Caesarean birth. Place of birth. Birth partners. Consent. Decision-making. The maternity system. The stuff nobody quite tells you.

We can talk about what happens when labour starts, how your body works, what might help, what your options are and what happens if birth takes a different direction.

Come with a list. Come with absolutely no idea where to start.

This is not about creating the perfect birth plan or promising you the perfect birth.

It is about helping you walk into birth knowing more, trusting yourself more and feeling far more able to navigate whatever comes.

2.5 hours | £110
Online or in person in Brighton & Hove

BOOK BIRTH PREPARATION

An induction is suggested. Your baby is breech. A home birth feels under threat. A caesarean is being discussed. Something has changed medically. Or you simply leave an appointment thinking, Hang on. What just happened?

Suddenly you are being asked to understand unfamiliar information and make decisions you never expected to make, often quickly and when emotions are already running high.

This is somewhere to bring all of that.

We can untangle what you have been told, look at the evidence, talk through your options and get clear about the questions you want to ask next.

I am not here to tell you what decision to make.

I am here to help you understand what is happening, find your voice within it and make sure the decision is actually yours.

90 minutes | £70
Online or in person in Brighton & Hove

BOOK WHEN BIRTH PLANS CHANGE

The new plan for when pregnancy changes the old plan

Sometimes you need to tell the whole story.

Not the edited version. Not the version you have found yourself telling everybody else. And definitely not the “at least you are both healthy” version.

What happened. What you remember. What you do not understand. What frightened you. What made you angry. The decisions that were made. The things that were said. The bits that keep going round and round in your head.

A birth debrief gives you time and space to tell your story with someone who understands maternity care, birth physiology and birth trauma.

We can piece together what happened, explore the questions you were left with and make space for how the experience actually felt to you.

There is no right way to feel about your birth.

And you do not need to prove that it was “bad enough” to deserve support.

If it matters to you, it matters.

Up to 2 hours | £90
Online or in person in Brighton & Hove

BOOK A BIRTH DEBRIEF

When understanding what happened is not quite enough.

Your mind knows the birth is over, but your body still seems to be living there.

Images. Flashbacks. Panic. Avoidance. Feeling on edge. A physical reaction when somebody mentions birth. Fear about another pregnancy or giving birth again.

Sometimes the memory of birth continues to trigger the nervous system long after the event itself has ended.

Birth Rewind is a gentle, structured technique designed to help reduce the distress attached to a difficult or traumatic birth memory.

You remain in control throughout and you do not have to describe every detail of what happened in order to work with the memory.

This is not about erasing your birth or pretending it did not matter.

The aim is for it to become something that happened to you, rather than something you are still inside.

Two 90-minute sessions | £135 total
Online or in person in Brighton & Hove

BOOK BIRTH REWIND

Support for you. Not just the baby.

Somehow, after giving birth, almost everything becomes about the baby.

This is for you.

Feeding questions. Physical recovery. Gentle movement. Baby massage techniques. Birth. Your body. Your emotions. Sleep. The hormonal shift. The enormous adjustment of becoming a mother.

Maybe you want practical help. Maybe you need reassurance. Maybe there are twenty questions sitting in your Notes app. Or maybe you simply want an experienced midwife to sit beside you and ask:

How are you actually doing?

There is no agenda and you do not need to have a particular problem.

We can spend the time on whatever you need that day.

Just one-to-one midwife support for that strange, exhausting, beautiful, messy bit after birth.