Labour of Love: Examining Birthing and Health Care

Last year, more than 300,000 children were born in Australia, yet systems in place for childbirth remain opaque and often discriminatory.

For M/OTHER, the Wheeler Centre brings together a panel of perinatal health experts and creatives to explore the disparity between birthing expectations and reality, the birthing body, structural healthcare barriers faced by First Nations communities, and why mental health care for new parents so often falls short.

Combining their personal experience with years of research and expertise in the fields of perinatal health, this panel features author of The Cost of Labour, Natalie Kon-Yu; nurse and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at RMIT, Dr Ruth De Souza; and Karinda Taylor, CEO at First Peoples’ Health and Wellbeing.

Together with feminist writer and organiser Karen Pickering, they will navigate the intersections between pregnancy, birthing and healthcare for a multi-faceted discussion of the contemporary birthing experience.

This conversation may include reference to difficult topics, such as mental health, reproductive rights, and childbirth. If you need assistance with any of these issues, you can learn more and seek advice via the Centre of Perinatal Excellence (COPE), Perintal Anxiety & Depression Australia (PANDA) and Beyond Blue.

Tickets for this event are $15 full price and $10 concession, with a Pay What You Wish option available. Advance bookings are essential.

Children under the age of two do not require a ticket and can sit in their guardian’s lap. For children aged 2-12, please book a free children’s ticket so that we may reserve a seat for them.

This event will also be live streamed, available on this page at the event start time. Bookings are not required. If you are tuning into the live stream and wish to help enable the Wheeler Centre to keep presenting accessible and low-cost events, you are able to support us with a tax-deductible donation here.

The official bookseller for M/OTHER is Neighbourhood Books.

M/OTHER is a weekend of fearless conversation about the ways ‘motherhood’ is experienced, portrayed and labelled by those who mother, have been mothered, wish they were mothers, do not identify as mothers, cannot or do not want to mother, and by society at-large.