Professor Anthony McCarthy:

The commonest phrase I use in my work when I am seeing people is to say that I am supposed to be an expert on the biological, psychological, social, spiritual and existential issues that may come up but that the woman I am seeing has to be the expert on herself as much as she can be and that we can try to work it out together. We do not take a view on the safety or not of home births. We certainly see women who have traumatic birth experiences, and we are always happy to see them. Sometimes that will be because of their image of what that birth would be before it, whether a home birth or a natural delivery, and imagining natural as safe rather than summer and winter, natural as beautiful cuddly bunnies rather than rats and tarantulas and natural as doing pregnancy yoga and thinking it is all going to go perfectly well rather than trauma, third degree tears, bleeding and barely living through it. We see women who have had experiences that subjectively and often objectively have been very traumatic, whatever the circumstances. We are not in a position to advise. Sometimes we see women and will recommend to obstetric colleagues on next deliveries. However, we have no role in advising in advance our obstetric colleagues on issues that we have no expertise in but we will always refer to the mental health side.