Jun 8, 2026 · 54 min · 9 segments
In this episode of The Baby Tribe, Afif speaks with Irish Times journalist Ellen Coyne about her reporting on the rise of freebirth in Ireland: giving birth without a midwife, doctor or trained…
Anne DohertyHostAfif El-KafacheHost
I think she's done a phenomenal job in kind of unpacking the facts and the fictions around all of this.
Um, my first thought is always for the individuals, um, involved at trying to, in trying to make that decision, because I think it's really, really important that people who are making that decision are not villainized in any way or othered.
Um, and one kind of analogy came to me, um, as I was thinking about it, and, like, if I said to you that a woman decided that her best place to deliver her child was up a tree, you would think that that's absolutely bananas.
I think that, you know, you'd be like, "How?" Like, "What the hell?" Like, that's a bananas decision.
But if I said to you that that tree was the only safe place in the midst of a massive monsoon, and it was the only dry place you could get out of the water to actually try and birth her child, you'd say that that was fairly sensible decision and such heroic measures, you know? So the context of all of these decisions are always really, really important, and it's not about the decision, it's about the context.
And I think any decision that's made in relation to women trying to e- or deciding to go against medical advice, or as the synonyms that are used, you know, moving outside of guidance and all of this kind of stuff, the context has to be queried for that.
So what I'm hearing from you really is, first of all, that's a really, I think, powerful analogy, and what it tells me is that we need to ask why are women walking away from hospital care.
There's the microscopic lens, so the individual circumstances, but then there's a macroscopic lens about the narratives that are being superimposed on that decision or that potential decision to push that decision forward, and I think w- we have to look at all of those things through both of those lenses.
Um, so, like, from an individual perspective, like, you've got a woman who's in the midst of a very deeply vulnerable personal experience.
We try and embed that trusted carev- caregiver in an infrastructure and in a system that is evidence-based, but we need to get better at creating that warm blanket rather than the cold machine.
And then when you superimpose the narrative from social media and from the internet that, you know, you are at the forefront, this woman is at the forefront of, you know, generations of women, you know, fighting against the patriarchy for control over their bodies, and that you stand in your own sense of empowerment and your own femininity when you move against the machine, it becomes very seductive, um, at a very vulnerable time.
And then the algorithm feeds this to you repeatedly because that is how the algorithm is designed.
And I can absolutely see where the monsoon comes from so that she needs to decide that that tree is the safe place.
I think she's done a phenomenal job in kind of unpacking the facts and the fictions around all of this.
Um, my first thought is always for the individuals, um, involved at trying to, in trying to make that decision, because I think it's really, really important that people who are making that decision are not villainized in any way or othered.
Um, and one kind of analogy came to me, um, as I was thinking about it, and, like, if I said to you that a woman decided that her best place to deliver her child was up a tree, you would think that that's absolutely bananas.
I think that, you know, you'd be like, "How?" Like, "What the hell?" Like, that's a bananas decision.
But if I said to you that that tree was the only safe place in the midst of a massive monsoon, and it was the only dry place you could get out of the water to actually try and birth her child, you'd say that that was fairly sensible decision and such heroic measures, you know? So the context of all of these decisions are always really, really important, and it's not about the decision, it's about the context.
And I think any decision that's made in relation to women trying to e- or deciding to go against medical advice, or as the synonyms that are used, you know, moving outside of guidance and all of this kind of stuff, the context has to be queried for that.
So what I'm hearing from you really is, first of all, that's a really, I think, powerful analogy, and what it tells me is that we need to ask why are women walking away from hospital care.
There's the microscopic lens, so the individual circumstances, but then there's a macroscopic lens about the narratives that are being superimposed on that decision or that potential decision to push that decision forward, and I think w- we have to look at all of those things through both of those lenses.
Um, so, like, from an individual perspective, like, you've got a woman who's in the midst of a very deeply vulnerable personal experience.
We try and embed that trusted carev- caregiver in an infrastructure and in a system that is evidence-based, but we need to get better at creating that warm blanket rather than the cold machine.
And then when you superimpose the narrative from social media and from the internet that, you know, you are at the forefront, this woman is at the forefront of, you know, generations of women, you know, fighting against the patriarchy for control over their bodies, and that you stand in your own sense of empowerment and your own femininity when you move against the machine, it becomes very seductive, um, at a very vulnerable time.
And then the algorithm feeds this to you repeatedly because that is how the algorithm is designed.
And I can absolutely see where the monsoon comes from so that she needs to decide that that tree is the safe place.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
