Welcome to the Free Birth Podcast, a supportive space for people who are learning,

exploring and celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth.

Together, we'll unpack truths, share personal stories,

and claim our ability to birth freely and intuitively. Here's your host, Emily Sal day. Today on the show we have Melissa from the UK. After a wonderful first birth with midwives in hospital, Melissa became obsessed with birth and was

left shocked to realize how uncommon a positive birth and hospital was.

Pregnant with her second, she chose to stay home and have a free birth

to then be harassed by child protective services and even have the cops busting

into her home. After a wonderful home birth, Melissa was quickly left traumatized by being attacked by social services for almost a year.

Pregnant again with her third, Melissa blazed her own path and made this birth her own.

My name is Melissa Thomas.

I have three children aged six four and two. I live in Nottingham in the UK.

I'm also a service user representative for maternity services here and I got into that through my birth experiences.

So I had my first daughter when I was 24.

It was a few days before my 25th birthday and none of my friends had had children and I'm an only child and so I didn't know anything about birth other than what I'd seen on TV.

My midwife was really nice. I saw the same midwife. It was in hospital. We see midwives through our

GP here. So it is a doctor's surgery, which not know anything about birth beforehand, that's your kind of expectation really, that's in a clinical environment.

And I don't remember birth choice has ever been discussed with me with my midwife.

It was just presumed that I would give birth in hospital and so I booked in to the hospital and I didn't really

give it any consideration because well I was a bit freaked out about the fact that I was going to have a baby to be honest. I was in the middle, well I was in the

final year of my degree at the time. Oh my gosh. So the baby was a little bit of a surprise?

It wasn't a surprise? It wasn't right yet. And never plans to have children. Wow.

But it was a really straightforward pregnancy. I was really concerned about labour. I didn't know what that was going to feel like.

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