The cost of birth trauma

[gentle music] Well, you've got two choices: it's a colostomy bag or death.

It makes life a misery.

Imagine being incontinent of urine and feces or having constant pelvic pain because your uterus is on the outside of your body.

Stop complaining.

Millions of women do it every day.

It's not that big a deal.

It almost felt like you were jumping and nothing was in place.

Then you felt like everything was just gonna come out between your legs.

I didn't even know how to explain to people the darkness I was feeling on a daily basis, the loneliness.

[gentle music] Giving birth is technicolor.

[gentle music] For the parents involved, it is a pivotal moment in their personal history, scrawled on the soul and etched on the heart.

Things happen in that process that you never forget.

I've done it four times.

Four.

And I can tell you from experience that a couple of things happen that we really should acknowledge.

One is that it is such a momentous occasion that little things can seem huge.

For instance, my ex overheard the midwife complaining about me, and then he told me, which was dumb, but for years afterwards I felt a crushing sense of failure because I'd been annoying while giving birth.

For years.

Two, in the lead-up to giving birth, you're center stage.

The doctors wanna see you.

You're being weighed, measured, loved, protected.

Then the minute the baby comes out, the spotlight shifts off you and onto the baby, and you become a bit of an afterthought.

It's a dramatic and profound upstaging where you go from being the most important person in the room to a bit player.

Now take those two things and add that to a birth where it didn't all go to plan.

One in three Australian women describe their birth experience as traumatic, and sometimes you can see it in the eyes of a new mother.