Once you start noticing, you can't go back to not noticing. And in pregnancy and birth, that means you're suddenly the one making decisions you may never have expected to have to make — about a life that is completely dependent on you. That's the weight of it. But there's an aloneness in it too, because you realise that nobody cares more about your baby than you do, and yet up to that point, you've probably assumed the expert in front of you simply was the expert. Then there's a moment — maybe more than one — where you see that what is being recommended is serving someone else in some way, even if not consciously, or that it isn't actually what's best for your child. That's frightening - and it's part of why perinatal mental health and physical safety are so tightly bound together. Feeling unsupported in your decisions doesn't just affect the birth itself, it affects how you carry the whole experience afterwards.

I realised on an intuitive level — who can't — that a forceps delivery would be traumatic. Maybe all birth is, by its nature. The force involved, the intensity of hormones, the tight spaces to navigate, the lack of prior experience. And then having spent the preceding ten years in mental health, seeing what trauma does to a person, especially when it hasn't been met, hasn't been witnessed — how it manifests in present day mental and emotional problems — how can we not be asking what the first episode of potential trauma is doing on a population level?

Because when a woman develops self-knowledge - when she tunes into her body, listens to it, understands what it is asking for and honours it - she becomes a woman who births intuitively. She is growing a baby that is gestating inside that intuition. That baby is born from that foundation. They grow up in a world where honouring intuition is just how life is lived. It is part of their blueprint, running through their veins. Whatever their life path, they have the odds stacked in their favour of being a human who knows themselves from the start.