Christine's Story
How did I end up as Chair of the Board of Birth Trauma Australia….. I didn’t choose this work so much as it found me, at the end of a very long road.
That road started with IVF. Anyone who has been through fertility treatment knows it is its own particular kind of endurance test, the injections, the appointments, the two-week waits, the hope you try not to let yourself feel and feel anyway. We went through multiple failed cycles before we ever got a positive test. And when we finally did, that pregnancy ended in miscarriage at three and a half months. I don’t think there is a way to describe that loss that does it justice.
Eventually, not long after pausing IVF to think about our future, we had a successful pregnancy, and our son was born. By the time he arrived, I thought the hardest parts were behind us. In some ways they were. In others, they were just beginning.
My son’s birth required a forceps delivery. What I didn’t know, what no one told me, was that the delivery had caused a levator avulsion, a tear in the pelvic floor muscle that, for many women, goes undiagnosed for years. I certainly didn’t know. I went home with my baby and did what every new mother does: I got on with it. It wasn’t until two years postpartum, when I began experiencing prolapse symptoms, that I learned what had actually happened to my body in that delivery room.
I opted for surgical repair. And at my last post-op appointment, I asked my urogynaecologist a question that, looking back, was really the beginning of everything that followed: how does this still happen, in this day and age? How was it possible that a significant injury sustained during childbirth could go unmentioned, undiagnosed, and unaddressed for two years, while I quietly assumed that what I was feeling was just what motherhood was supposed to feel like?
She didn’t have an answer for me. What she did have was a suggestion: go find funding, and do something about it.
So I did the modern equivalent of taking her at her word, I left her rooms and I googled “birth injuries.” Somewhere in those search results was an article referencing an organisation I’d never heard of: The Australasian Birth Trauma Association, now known as Birth Trauma Australia. It was 2019. I picked up the phone and spoke to Amy Dawes, the CEO, and something in that conversation clicked. Here was someone who understood, in granular and unflinching detail, exactly what I had just lived through, and who was building something to make sure fewer women would have to live through it in silence.
I started small, the way most of us do, helping with specific projects, lending whatever skills and hours I could spare around the edges of work and family life. Over time, that grew into a role as Company Secretary, and then, eventually, into the role I hold now as Chair of the Board. I was just a woman who wanted an answer to a question no one seemed able to give me, and who found, instead, a community of people asking the same question and refusing to accept silence as the answer.
Ten years on, I think often about what Birth Trauma Australia has built in that time. There’s what I didn’t have in that delivery room, or in the two years that followed it. Injuries like mine were treated as an unfortunate but unremarkable cost of childbirth, something you were expected to simply carry, quietly, and work around. Women were sent home from hospital with their babies and very little else: no clear information about what had happened to their bodies, no consistent pathway to the right specialists, and often no acknowledgement that what they’d experienced was an injury at all, let alone one deserving of proper care and follow-up. Birth Trauma Australia has spent ten years changing that, for women, so they have the language and the knowledge to recognise what’s happening to their own bodies, and for clinicians, so fewer of them are left without answers to give.
And there’s what I found the moment I picked up the phone to Amy. Somewhere in those search results was more than information; it was a community. Women now have somewhere to turn when their own doctors don’t have the answers. They have each other.
I think about the version of me sitting in that urogynaecologist’s waiting room, two years into unexplained symptoms, with no idea that what I was experiencing had a name, a cause, and a community of women who understood it. I think about how much shorter and less lonely that road could have been if an organisation like this one had reached me sooner. That’s what keeps me in this work. Ten years is a milestone worth marking. But if the last decade has taught me anything, it’s that the work of making sure women are told the truth about their own bodies, before, during, and after birth, is never really finished. I’m proud of what Birth Trauma Australia has built so far. I’m even more invested in what comes next.
