The Osborne Kneeling Chair - a great bit of kit!

Margaret Jowitt, UK physiologist and long-term birth activist, has combined her skills to develop the Osborne Kneeling Chair for birth centres and labour wards everywhere.  All is beautifully shown on this short film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlHHH31US3g

Margaret has been working on this project for a number of years and has refined her design to meet all infection control and other institutional requirements, whilst making sure that her basic idea of enabling free movement and facilitating upright labour and birth are not compromised.  The final product looks astonishingly simple but has taken hours, months, years of research, design, engineering and investment.  UM wishes her all the best with getting this superb product into birthing rooms across Europe and beyond.

New AIMS book on gestational diabetes

The Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (for whom we all, mothers and midwives, give thanks in the UK) have published a new book on Gestational Diabetes available from http://www.aims.org.uk/
https://www.aims.org.uk/shop/item/gestational-diabetes

The author has tried to make this complicated and increasingly ubiquitous issue of hyperglycaemia in pregnancy understandable, point out where decisions, choices and issues of consent arise, and give information around these.  The book covers all areas of pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period as well as longer-term issues.  There is a useful resource section and some lovely illustrations by Jennifer Williams.

Professor Soo Downe explaining in simple terms WHAT WOMEN WANT!

The link below is to a YouTube clip of Soo Downe, Professor of Midwifery Studies at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, summarising what women want from maternity care according to research on this important area. 

Why are these findings important to hold before us in any discussion about the maternity services?  Because too many people - journalists, politicians, and general misogynists - have seen fit to pontificate in the UK press over the summer on their views of what women should want with absolutely no reference to the views or insights of women or any other experts in the field (user groups, midwives, obstetricians, doulas, hypnobirthing teachers etc).    

https://youtu.be/dZmR23_XxNg

Soo enumerates simply and effectively why misogynistic fantasies about risk-averse medico-techno-delivery will always miss their mark - women want their embodied experiences of birth to take place within a context of love, support and kindness.  The real risk of not having the latter trumps the putative risks of not having the former.  But UM doubts Jeremy Hunt and his cronies will get it, alas.