Keynote Speaker
Nadine Richardson
Nadine Richardson became a doula to understand birth more deeply - everything else, has been a bonus. She's the founder of She Births®, a scientifically validated childbirth education program, with her randomised trial results published in the British Medical Journal 2016.
Nadine has spent over 20 years teaching birth education, working as a doula, yoga teacher, podcaster, speaker and recently published her first book.
She Births: Your practical guide to a beautiful birth (Murdoch Books / Allen & Unwin) is available now in Australia, Europe and the USA.
Based between Sydney and the Northern Rivers, Nadine's work centres on restoring the sacredness of birth and helping families create a beautiful birth, whatever unfolds.
She is currently working on two exciting creative projects that expand her work into the mainstream. Both projects plan to shift cultural attitudes and change representation of birth in the media.
The Red Thread: Birth, memory and the beauty in becoming
"Birth is not the opening of a story, but rather the middle of a much longer sentence." Erica Pinilla, doula
The word "doula" is barely fifty years old, coined in the 1970s by the same anthropologist who gave us the word "matrescence." The role itself is ancient, and has never been more needed, or more contested.
This is a three-generation memoir of birth (mine, my mother's, my grandmother's) tracing how modernisation has changed motherhood and birth. Looking back along our own red thread, not only as women but also as doulas, might be the perfect way to gain the strength and insight we need to face what is coming. So many of today's public debates miss the real issues mothers and doulas face. Our occupational evolution has never moved independently of our clients' or our cultures - the personal, collective and biological cannot be separated.
This talk addresses what is coming and what is changing, and importantly, what will never change. From a historical, cultural and global perspective we must expand our role as doulas in order to preserve birth in the future.
As access to care shrinks and complexity rises, more families are turning to either freebirth or scheduled deliveries. We need clarity on our own role and limitations and we also need to embrace our role as educators within the community.
As reliance on AI develops, ectogenesis (artificial womb technology) is expected within the next 10 years - human trials are already in the application process. What is left for us to acknowledge or support, once birth can be performed in a bag, entirely outside a body?
Becoming a mother and a doula, in any generation, means picking up a thread you didn't know you were holding and choosing, consciously, what to do with it next.
What this session covers: the Red Thread across three generations; a short history of the word "doula"; the scale/market growth and pressure on our profession today, including Australia-specific data; debates of corporate involvement; the ethical terrain of scope; what ectogenesis puts at stake for the felt, sublime and awe filled experiences of not only birth but critically pregnancy and postpartum. The future is actually asking us to be more than simply birth support and become the guardians of both physiology and magic. How can we do that?