#22 A Labour of Love; Molly O'Brien and the Power of Childbirth

Nonsense in the Chaos

Molly O’Brien is an old friend of mine and an incredible and highly experienced midwife. Molly has more than 20 years of clinical practice experience and has attended over a thousand births. She’s also a hypnobirth and birth preparation teacher, an associate university lecturer, has created courses for midwives, campaigned for midwife led birth units and has been a passionate student and enabler of normal physiological birth.

Her favourite work was in the home environment and in a Midwife Led Birth Unit. It’s allowed her to attend hundreds of undisturbed physiological births and this has given her the opportunity to make a systematic exploration of midwifery skills and observations that can help resolve long difficult labours caused by a suboptimal position. The techniques and strategies that emerged from this time helped her revolutionise her own practice. She began to regularly witness dramatic progress as she put them to use in “difficult labours”. Now she teaches the course she developed for Birth Professionals, ‘Biomechanics for Birth’.

Molly taught me the importance and power of sisterhood, from meeting her when I was in my late twenties. I remember sitting with her around the kitchen table, sitting with a group of women, spanning four decades between us all, and us talking about women’s issues in a way I’d never experienced before. Molly brought wisdom and insight to that conversation that taught me, for the first time, how powerful age and experience is, and how we’d all been sold up the river by being tricked into fearing age and turning on our fellow sisters, rather than supporting and embracing each other in our journeys. It changed the way I treated other women after that.

If you’d like to find out more about Molly’s work go to https://www.optimalbirth.co.uk/

The music and artwork is by @moxmoxmoxiemox

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