Birth Stories with Sophie Walker

Sophie Walker has interviewed more than 350 women about their experiences with pregnancy, birth, loss and postpartum care and her podcast has had 10 million downloads. She believes the key to having a positive birth experience is education.

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Tell us about yourself and your family.

I’m Sophie, and I live in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne with my husband and our three little boys (nine, six and three).

My husband is a primary school teacher but is on long-service leave, trying out life as a stay-at-home dad. Like many teachers, he’s feeling pretty burnt out from Covid. But, he’s a great teacher with a lot to offer kids. I hope he finds a way to go back in some capacity.

As for me, I’m excited to be talking to you from my home office. I used to record my Australian Birth Stories podcast from my car. It wasn’t great for ergonomics, but I have three very loud boys. It was hard to coordinate everyone being out of the house while interviewing someone else with a baby and kids.

What did you do before you started Australian Birth Stories?

I have a BA in Health Science and International Relations. When I was younger, I had big dreams of working overseas with an NGO. I moved to London and volunteered with Médecins Sans Frontières, but I ended up working in other jobs. When I came back to Australia, I did my Master of Public Health and specialised in women’s health and international health—still thinking I might do aid work.

After that, I worked in cancer research, helping research women with a predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer. This role required lots of interviewing and reviewing pathology reports. It combined my love of health science and my love of talking. I left that position to have my first son, and after a year off with him, I started working with the Cancer Council. After the birth of my second son, I left the Cancer Council and started the podcast.

What is Australian Birth Stories?

It started as a podcast collating Australian pregnancy and childbirth stories. When I had my first child, the birth was really difficult, and I felt very underprepared and came away thinking, “That was not what I expected.”

When I was pregnant the second time, I ingested as many birth stories as possible. However, I found it hard to access Australian stories that spoke of the drugs and hospital models we are familiar with here. And when I mentioned it to a friend, she said, “You should just do a podcast.” This was in 2017, before podcasts were a big thing. I just watched some free YouTube tutorials and did it on my laptop.

Initially, only family and close friends listened. The first episode is about my second birth, and the second episode features my sister’s experience. Then I literally badgered close friends because I knew I had to keep the momentum going and do one every week. These days, I have more than 5,000 applications
of stories to share and the podcast has 10 million downloads, so there’s plenty of content.

Australian Birth Stories offers more than a podcast these days.

That’s right. For the first two years, it was purely a podcast with a basic website explaining a little about each episode. Then, it gradually grew.

I pitched to brands about advertising and reached out to a podcaster I admired for mentoring. She didn’t do mentoring but recommended a friend. I was advised that my following was large enough to start selling something. So, I made an online course on postpartum care, which was a path I was walking myself—I was seeing a women’s health physio for prolapse issues and trying to get on top of my iron levels. We now have five courses.

Do any of the interviews stand out in your mind?

There are so many interesting stories. There’s everything from missed miscarriages and stillbirths to non-intervention water births at home, stories of gestational diabetes, and one about a woman who went into organ shutdown with HELLP syndrome. I also loved the episode about a same-sex couple who both breastfed their babies—one mother induced lactation even though she hadn’t carried a baby before.

Can you tell us about your own birth stories?

I would consider the first one traumatic, though I now realise there are worse stories. I went into the birth very confident, thinking I wasn’t going to have any interventions and I would embrace the challenge. But, I laboured for at least twenty hours but got stuck at five centimetres dilated. The midwife broke my waters, but nothing changed, so she said it was time for induction medication to help me along. So, I had an epidural too.

My son was 4.4 kilograms, and because I’d had an epidural, I was lying on my back and couldn’t get him out, so I had forceps, an episiotomy and a postpartum haemorrhage. He was born blue and unresponsive. My mum and sister were there, along with my husband, and my mum ran out of the room crying because she thought he was stillborn. It was a terrible two minutes until he came around. The whole labour was about thirty-six hours.

How were your other births different?                                 

Going into the second birth, I felt like I had mentally given up the first time and I wanted to be well prepared. I did a lot more homework and things were easier, but my second child was also a kilo smaller. The whole labour was only five hours. I rang my midwife and explained where I was at, and she said I should come in now. I was like, “Really? I feel pretty good.” But I went in. And when I got to the hospital forty minutes later, I squatted down on the edge of the bed, and he came straight out onto the yoga mat. It was like a dream. Having two very different birth stories made me want to share  those stories and was the impetus for the podcast.

For the third baby, despite everything I’d learnt, I was impatient and did a lot of acupuncture and induction massage. I don’t think he was ready to be evicted, and he wasn’t in an ideal position yet. The midwife said she’d break my waters and see if that helped him move into a better position, which I’ve since learnt probably wasn’t a great thing, but he slid out after that. I think it was about forty minutes of very intense labour but with a ten-day lead-up.

Is there anything you want to see changed about birthing in Australia?

Research proves the best outcomes for mother and baby are when a known care provider assists throughout the whole period of care—pregnancy and postpartum. To have the same care provider while going through the public health system requires more funding. Right now, only about 3 per cent of women in Australia have access to that program. I used that program three times and had amazing care with a known midwife I could text throughout.
I want that to be accessible for more women.

Or, if you don’t want midwifery care, having access to a known obstetrician throughout your care is really important. And again, there’s just not enough funding or access, and that’s only become worse during Covid.

There’s a real burnout in midwives at the moment, and lots of staffing issues in hospitals. I spoke to an obstetrician recently and he said, “We try and keep caesarean mums and their babies together in recovery as much as possible, but if there’s a rostering issue or the hospital is short-staffed and hasn’t got a midwife, the baby can’t stay with the mum.” That time is such an incredibly intimate point in the baby and mum’s life that can’t be re-created. To think they might not get that time together due to rostering issues makes me feel really sad.

As my audience has grown and Australian Birth Stories has gained more attention, I feel a real sense of responsibility to try and campaign for these things. I think I sat on the fence for a while.

Is there anything unique about birthing in Australia?

Australian women are “dropped at the six”. They get a quick ten-minute check-up at six weeks postpartum, and it’s like, “You’re feeling okay emotionally? You’re healing okay? Breastfeeding is okay? Great, see you later.” I think lots of other countries nurture that time and place a lot more respect and care towards the mother, even providing free pelvic floor physiotherapy to all new mothers. In Australia, the mum doesn’t seem to matter once the baby is out.

I think many other countries also have much better publicly funded home birth options. There’s an increase in people wanting to have home births in Australia, probably due to Covid and all the restrictions placed around how many people you can have in the birthing suite, but it’s quite hard to do in the public system. Yet it would take a lot of pressure off the hospital system.

What are your postpartum care tips?

Go deep and be honest. Even putting down expectations around sex is important. If it’s your first baby, that’s hard to do. But just saying, “I’ve listened to this podcast and heard lots of women find it hard to get back into sex, maybe because it’s painful or maybe because of prolapse.”

And then, when you do feel ready, talk about how you might like to reintroduce it.

People set aside time for a birthing course, but I think time also needs to be set aside to have dinner as a couple and plan how you might manage when you’re both really sleep deprived, how you’ll cope when one parent transitions back to work, and all the expectations. It’s very easy to get into a passive-aggressive stage because couples have assumed the other person will do certain things.

Tell us about your book.

We are always being asked for book recommendations but not many are Australian or recent. So, we’ve tried to create something that’s Australian and inclusive.

The book’s called The Complete Australian Guide to Pregnancy and Birth, and it includes stories from the podcast. A big point of difference is that it’s very mother‑focused while also educating you on what is happening with the baby. You are a mother from the minute you conceive. We try to guide a mother so that when they begin the fourth trimester⎯mothering and caring for a baby⎯they can draw on those skills.

Jodi, who I co-wrote it with, is a yoga teacher and birth educator. She has provided some beautiful breathwork and meditations. We’ve also got a whole chapter written on birthing on Country, which a team of First Nations midwives wrote for us. And we’ve got a chapter on miscarriage.

One in four Australian women miscarry. Those numbers could be higher. If women reading our book get to a point where their pregnancy doesn’t progress, we don’t want them to feel like they don’t belong in that space and shut the book because they think they’re no longer a mother. There’s a lot of unspoken options and care for how you go about having a miscarriage. I haven’t miscarried myself, and neither has Jodi, so we’ve gone to people who have and documented what’s involved.

We’ve also got a section on domestic violence, which exponentially increases, particularly for an unplanned pregnancy. So, we’ve got resources to support women through that. We’ve touched on some pretty heavy topics while trying to be nurturing, inclusive and as all-encompassing as possible.

What do you want birthing people to know?

I want women to know that going with the flow is not a birthing plan. Just because a midwife, doctor or obstetrician helps women give birth every day, it doesn’t mean they know what you want or what’s best for you and your family. Education is the only answer. If you educate yourself on all the potential options, you’ll feel more empowered. If you feel empowered, you will feel like you're still making the decisions during the birth—even if it’s not going the way you hoped. Knowing your options is crucial. One in three women in Australia report having birth trauma, and I believe education is a big part of reducing those numbers.

Is there anything you want birthing partners to know?

Partners should be just as educated as the person birthing. In my first birth, I said I wanted an epidural. My husband said, “But remember you said you didn’t really want that?” And I was like, “Okay, get Mum.” I got Mum over and said, “I’m serious. Order it now, it could take an hour—get me an epidural.” My husband had heard my original plan, but we hadn’t discussed it properly before the event and communicated all the options.

Then, in my second labour, I didn’t speak at all. Birthing partners should know what your labour could look and sound like. They should understand you could be a totally different person. If someone had done light touch massage to me when I was birthing, I think I would have punched them.

It’s also really important to have conversations about postpartum. If you want to breastfeed, there are things you’ll need to have in place to support you, and that means talking to your partner and setting things up. Discussing it before you’re both sleep deprived and stressed makes the conversation much easier.

Have you learnt anything about yourself through your work with Australian Birth Stories?

From a business sense, I’ve learnt that if you break things down into small tasks, you can achieve anything. I’m not very organised, so it’s bizarre to think I run my own business. I’ve done a lot of online courses and listened to a lot of business podcasts—just take it one step at a time.

From a birth point of view, I think I would do things differently to what I did in my previous births. I’m definitely not going to have a fourth child, but I’m always learning, reflecting and growing. It can be hard to take your own advice, but I wish I had stayed home and relaxed more.

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Birth Stories with Sophie Walker was originally published in Lunch Lady Magazine Issue 30.