Maternity advocacy groups around the country rally together to protect women's rights in birth
- secretary1357
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 32 minutes ago
Our collective Boards were shocked to read yesterday's Facebook post about the Australian College of Midwives and Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' joint position statement calling for the enactment across the country of South Australian legislation that "expressly restricts labour- and birth-management (including the three stages of labour, birth of the baby, and the third stage) to appropriately trained, registered practitioners".
Rather than taking the necessary steps to explore why some women choose to leave the maternity system altogether, the ACM and RANZCOG feel the best course of action is to ride roughshod over women's rights to birth wherever and with whomever they choose.
And as we're already seeing in South Australia, attending a birth has been interpreted as "management of labour and birth".
Together with Dr Bashi Kumar-Hazard, Board Chair from Human Rights in Childbirth International, we have put together this media release, in collaboration with the following maternity advocacy groups from across the country as co-signatories:
Sharon Settecasse, President, Better Births Illawarra
Phillipa Scott, Convenor, Homebirth Australia
Amy O’Meagher, President, Perth Birth Link
Alecia Staines, Founder, Maternity Consumer Network
Sally Cusack, President, PBB Media, Australia
Jerusha Sutton, Co-founder, Birth Time
Amanda Banks, Co-Director and Producer, Born at Home film
Fiona O’Shaughnessy, Board Member, Hygieia Health
Katelyn Commerford, President, Homebirth New South Wales
The Committee, Homebirth Queensland
Samantha Gunn, President, Doula Network Australia
Elsie Ruijgrok, President, Homebirth Victoria
Freya Croft, President, Birth In Tasmania Ella Noah Bancroft, Founder and CEO, The Returning Indigenous Corporation
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MEDIA RELEASE and MP Brief 4.30pm, 4 Nov 2025
Maternity Consumers call on governments to focus on protecting pregnant women’s fundamental human rights rather than hindering those rights by succumbing to the interests of obstetric and midwifery industry lobby groups.
In the wake of the NSW Birth Trauma Inquiry that highlighted the significant extent to which women are abused and disrespected within facility-based maternity care in Australia, maternity consumers are calling on all health ministers to protect women from further violations of their human and legal rights currently being proposed by maternity industry lobby groups.
Women have the right to determine the circumstances of their birth and to the companions of their choice, without interference from governments or health service-providers. Such interference would constitute a violation of women’s rights to equality, autonomy, privacy and self-determination. Pregnant women are entitled to enjoy the same rights as everyone else.
Instead of focussing on the recommendations of the Birth Trauma Inquiry and minimising the disrespectful and abusive care that is widespread in maternity health facilities, maternity industry lobby groups are pushing for the imposition of measures that will further undermine women’s legal and human rights, and restrict their ability to protect themselves from harm. Such actions constitute a dangerous, unconstitutional overreach into the private lives of women and are a reflection of the attitudes healthcare providers really hold about pregnant women.
This announcement comes as the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG) and the Australian College of Midwives (ACM) yesterday released a joint statement requesting state and federal health ministers to enact legislation consistent with the model adopted in South Australia under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (South Australia) (Restricted Birthing Practices) Amendment Act 2013.
Dr Bashi Kumar-Hazard, University of Sydney Law School & Chair, Human Rights in Childbirth:
“The South Australian legislation has led to the prosecution and anti-competitive control of doulas irrespective of women’s wishes. Healthcare professionals exert unauthorised and unprecedented levels of power by utilising child protection services and the SA police to raid homes and threaten pregnant women who do not comply with their demands. Recent coronial inquests into Flinders University Hospital reveal the extent to which maternity healthcare providers abuse and disrespect women with absolute impunity.
Women are not stupid. They know doulas are not doctors or midwives. They hire them because doulas offer them the emotional and physical support women are denied in hospitals. Doulas also bear witness to the abuse and disrespect women experience in hospitals. We are not at all surprised that industry lobby groups want to eliminate a source of accountability that supports women.”
Dr Catherine Bell, Managing Director, Maternity Choices Australia:
“Efforts to impose such legislative models are a convenient distraction from the real issues of facility-based abuse and disrespect that require immediate attention by these lobby groups with vested interests. The measures they propose will not increase the safety of birthing women and their babies. It will alienate more women and further erode women’s trust in healthcare providers and health facilities.”
Sharon Settecasse, President, Better Births Illawarra:
“The solution is not to isolate pregnant women and outlaw doulas. Lobby groups need instead to focus on how to provide access to respectful maternity care for ALL women, regardless of who they choose to birth with.”
Alecia Staines, Founder, Maternity Consumer Network:
“Failure to address the real issues, which is an absence of home-based and/or relationship-based care that is safe and in line with what women want and need, is the real problem. Rapidly increasing rates of interventions in Australian hospitals since 2009 have not seen improvements in the mortality or morbidity of women and babies. ‘Good outcomes’ in facilities are measured by mortality alone, and inappropriately ignore the women leaving hospitals with significant physical and mental health injuries to deal with, often alone.”
Azure Rigney, Advocacy Manager, Homebirth Australia:
“Death still occurs within the clinical model of care and, as the recent NSW Birth Trauma Inquiry highlighted, women are being physically and emotionally damaged in hospitals at increasing rates without requisite gain. Who really stands to gain from this legislation? Definitely not women.”
Amy O’Meagher, Director, The Perth Birth Link:
“Erosion of women’s rights in pregnancy is being experienced right across the country. Women in Western Australia come to us daily with their experiences of unnecessarily inflicted trauma. Of course when they are unsupported, unheard, or mistreated within the maternity system, they will seek safety where they can find it. The growing number of women birthing outside the system is not evidence of recklessness, it is evidence of a system that is failing to meet women’s needs.”
Real solutions would include mandated training on the legal and human rights of women for all maternity healthcare professionals, increasing access to woman centered maternity services that consumers have been demanding for decades, including known midwifery support in the home, and encouraging more health services, particularly obstetricians, to provide services in rural and regional areas where some women are birthing outside the system, not from choice, but from necessity. These recommendations will strengthen maternal and newborn safety, support professional practice and contribute to equitable access to birthing care across Australia, while also increasing accountability and transparency around the practices of maternity healthcare providers.
Consumers ask that our elected representatives:
Put the voices of women BEFORE the interests of maternity lobby groups. We are, as consumers of maternity health services, the most affected by these vested interest groups that repeatedly sideline and ignore us.
Redefine what success in maternity care means. Move beyond mortality rates as the sole measure of outcomes to include respect, autonomy, informed consent, emotional wellbeing, and the absence of trauma.
Introduce legislation that protects women, not punishes them. Pursue accountability measures for abuse and disrespect in facility-based care and the implementation of a patient bill of rights that will protect women from such mistreatment - a phrase better known in international law as “obstetric violence”.
Ensure universal access to relationship-based midwifery care. Fund and expand home- and facility- based midwifery continuity-of-care models nationwide so every woman, regardless of postcode, can access safe, respectful, and evidence-based support throughout pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.
Further information: See attached Homebirth Consortium Australia Priorities MP brief.
We stand ready to work with governments and maternity industry groups to produce solutions that work for us as women, as mothers and as consumers, and which meet Australia’s legal and international obligations to protect women’s rights to equality, autonomy, privacy and self-determination in ALL aspects of our lives.
//ENDS
Co-signatories:
Sharon Settecasse, President, Better Births Illawarra
Phillipa Scott, Convenor, Homebirth Australia
Amy O’Meagher, Director, The Perth Birth Link
Alecia Staines, Founder, Maternity Consumer Network
Sally Cusack, President, PBB Media
Jerusha Sutton, Co-founder, Birth Time
Amanda Banks, Co-Director and Producer, Born at Home film
Fiona O’Shaughnessy, Board Member, Hygieia Health
Katelyn Commerford, President, Homebirth New South Wales The Committee, Homebirth Queensland
Samantha Gunn, President, Doula Network Australia
Elsie Ruijgrok, President, Homebirth Victoria
Freya Croft, President, Birth In Tasmania Ella Noah Bancroft, Founder and CEO, The Returning Indigenous Corporation
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