Says Dad, Cuong,”Early morning Ambulance ride to hospital from home... I arrived at 8:15 and was in the delivery suite... Anne-Marie was already fully dilated!

A couple of hours of seeing some of the most intense pushing in my life, what a surreal experience, we welcomed a little boy into the world!”

Anne-Marie wrote to us, “Even while enjoying the first skin-to-skin contact with my son I was already enthusing about our next birth journey. Thank you - Birthtalk was one of the pieces in the puzzle that helped us.”

I was attracted to Birthtalk initially because I was desperate for an alternative to the hospital-provided antenatal classes, which really just seemed like a long Workplace Health & Safety session.

Before attending Birthtalk meetings, I felt very little confidence about my ability to birth. I had never heard a woman tell her account of a birth that unfolded without some sort of intervention - and the women I spoke with never knew exactly why the intervention they had had been essential - simply that the obstetrician/midwife/ whoever had said they needed it - this made birth seem like an inherently dangerous thing which invariably went wrong. The mystery surrounding other women's experiences reinforced to me the idea that things going wrong is simply part & parcel of birth.

Birthtalk absolutely changed my views, knowledge base and feelings about my upcoming birth. Birthtalk gave me the insight to feel secure that my desire to aim for a natural birth was totally valid and safe - and that I wasn't being naive or self-centred (ie putting myself before my baby's wellbeing).

Birthtalk helped my family to have a very positive birth experience - and this gave me the confidence to come home early from hospital and to really cherish our postnatal period. It gave me great confidence about our future as a family - and it changed my attitude: our journey to birth had shown me that I really could achieve that which I thought impossible, and so I now face all the little hurdles that babies bring with an attitude that we don't need to know all the answers up front: we'll work through things. I felt so filled with positivism that I wasn't looking for anything to go wrong, I was assuming it would go right.

Our good birth journey has really cemented our union, because we made the journey together, rather than me doing all the reading and simply telling my husband how I wanted it to be.

I would recommend Birthtalk to everyone! I would particularly recommend it to first-time mums who are scared because they have only ever heard the horror stories, seen the dramatic scenes of blood, pain, boiling water and towels on TV and think that this is the only way that birth is.