Rachel’s story
It is strange to think that my involvement with Birth Trauma Australia started with me saying no.
Samantha Payne, my fellow co-founder at Pink Elephants Support Network, suggested that Amy Dawes speak with me. Amy got in touch when I was eight months pregnant with my fourth child, and I remember thinking there was absolutely no way I had capacity for another thing.
But we talked.
Amy and her co-founders had already establishedwhat was then the Australasian Birth Trauma Association, and Amy had built a website, but I saw so much potential for more.
The website was probably the beginning. It needed love and care. It needed someone to feed it, think about how people moved through it, what information they needed, and how the organisation should sound and feel. It needed a personality.
So I started helping.
And, as tends to happen with me, helping with one thing became thinking about the next thing.
What resource do we need? What would help women explain what they were experiencing? What do health professionals need? What does an awareness campaign look like? How do we raise money? How do we take an idea and give it a name, a structure and a mechanism that means somebody can actually use it?
By my rough calculation, for much of the first five years I volunteered around 15 hours a week. At the time I was also working full time in the not-for-profit sector, raising my family and helping to build Pink Elephants. Eventually I stepped away from Pink Elephants and more of the time I had available went into BTA.
There were websites. I think three versions over the years: resources we designed and wrote, health professional materials, support for our diverse community, peer support, and, for a while, an online chat support service. We made fundraising attempts, engaged with Rotary, submitted funding applications, ran year after year of Birth Trauma Awareness Week campaigns, and held the first Birth Trauma Summit, followed by further events for consumers and health professionals.
But when I think about how the work actually happened, I think about Amy coming to NSW and staying at my house.
We would sit together and workshop, often well into the evening. We talked about what women were telling BTA, what was missing, what we could realistically do now and what we wanted to exist eventually. There were always ideas, some we could make happen immediately and others that sat with us for years until the right people, capacity or opportunity came along.
ThinkNatal™ Education was one of those ideas.
Amy insists the name was a joint effort, but I argue otherwise… we still laugh about this today. What mattered was what sat behind it: the idea that this work could reach further upstream. That alongside supporting people living with physical and/oremotional birth trauma, we could contribute to better antenatal education and better professional practice. Over time I helped build the learning management system, worked on the modules, slide decks, design and resources, and supported the thinking around healthcare professionals themselves, including vicarious trauma.
One of the things I have valued most is Amy’s trust. Not just trust in me to make something look good or build a website, but trust in my judgement and in the experience I was accumulating elsewhere.
My paid work increasingly took me into refugee and migrant communities and culturally and linguistically diverse Western Sydney. That inevitably came into my thinking with BTA too. I became much more conscious of who wasn’t necessarily seeing themselves in our work, and of the difference between translating a resource and genuinely designing something with the people it is intended to support. Multilingual and multicultural resources, created with communities rather than simply for them, remain something I hope Birth Trauma Australia has the funding to pursue properly.
Another part of this story took me much longer to understand.
I had my own experience of birth-related trauma. For years, I worked on resources, campaigns, and stories that helped other people put words around what had happened to them, while being completely unable to do that for myself. I just wasn’t there yet.
I think working alongside Amy and being trusted with so many other people’s experiences eventually helped me find my own way towards it.
There were periods when I stepped away. I had been volunteering at a fairly ridiculous level for years, and eventually I was burnt out. I think that matters in this story because organisations like Birth Trauma Australia have been built on an enormous amount of professional expertise, lived experience and labour that is largely invisible.
And perhaps that is my birthday or anniversary wish.
Birth Trauma Australia has grown up. The conversation around birth-related trauma has grown with it. Its resources now speak about something affecting as many as one in three birthing parents in Australia. With Amy’s relentless passion and drive to make births better, BTA has kept listening, learning, changing language, responding to what people are experiencing, and broadening the conversation to include families and the healthcare professionals caring for them.
I hope the next chapter brings the funding to match that work.
Funding not simply to respond to trauma, but to help prevent it. To continue improving education and practice. To reach communities whose experiences we still don’t hear enough. To support families and health professionals. And to contribute to the much bigger conversation Australia needs to keep having about maternity care and women’s health.
Because ultimately, the best future for Birth Trauma Australia would be one in which fewer people need it.
Birth Trauma Australia, Amy Dawes, I am incredibly proud of the part I’ve played in helping you, and so many others, build it, and very proud of just how much we have managed to make happen along the way.
And then there is the thing I am perhaps most grateful for, which has very little to do with websites, campaigns or resources.
Somewhere along the way, Amy became a very dear friend.
Behind all of this work are the early morning calls, the texts that start with “what do you think of this?”, the “how on earth are we going to do this?” conversations, and hours and hours of tears and talking things through. There have been debriefs, frustrations, ridiculous ideas that sometimes became very good ones, and plenty of picking each other up along the way.
We have shared far more than the work.
When I think about almost ten years of Birth Trauma Australia, that friendship is probably the thing I will treasure most.
