As you prepare to bring a new life into the world, you have the power to create an empowering birth experience. To have an empowered birth is to be an active participant,  a confident decision maker and to be able to look back on your birth with pride and joy. You deserve to have an empowered birth, one in which you are well informed and have made choices that are right for you and your family. A birth in which you feel listened to, honoured and respected.

Birth is a rite of passage but it is not honoured as such in our culture and mothers and  babies can suffer as a result. 

Alison Shaloe, a qualified midwife and lactation consultant in London, has experience of working with families in the postnatal period who have had empowering births and those who have had births that left them feeling disappointed with their birth…