Tani Newton
Monique Kors tells her story to Tani Newton.
I was born in the Netherlands and came to New Zealand at 28. I decided to become a midwife after having my own children. It is a lovely time when a woman is pregnant, and what attracted me to midwifery was the challenge of being able to inform women about what to do to help themselves, to improve their health and to have a better childbirth.
In those days you had to do nursing training first so I studied nursing at Hawkes Bay Polytech (now EIT) and then midwifery at Wellington Polytech. I qualified in 1995, just after the change from midwives being there for the women to help them give birth, to doctors doing it. I worked as a hospital midwife but felt that there was not much to do, as I was not assisting with births.
Two years later I went to Reading Hospital in England to get more experience. With 3,500 births a year, it was like a baby factory and I certainly got the experience! But it wasn’t very personal care.
In 1997 I came back to New Zealand and worked as an independent midwife and lead maternity carer. I came to Gisborne and worked at a medical practice, which was great, because I could devote myself to looking after pregnant women and someone else could do all the administration and paperwork.
I do move around a bit…I was back to London to work at a birth centre there, and then I went to Malawi: that was certainly a culture shock. Women gave birth in wards with hardly any privacy. The latrines were outside, and men would come through the wards selling samosas. Babies died, women died and there was no accountability. Because of the high death rate, countries which had loaned money to Malawi said that they could keep it if they spent it on nursing and midwifery training. So I think a lot of people did it just because they wanted a tertiary education, and that was the only one you could get for free. Some of them weren’t really dedicated midwives, and they seemed very harsh on the women. Maybe it was because of this harsh treatment that the number of traditional-style births, as opposed to hospital births, actually increased from 45 per cent to 55 per cent.
But it was interesting that, because midwives in Malawi did everything – twins, breech births, you name it – they stayed very knowledgeable and proficient.
When I next went to England, I worked for Caroline Flint, a very well-known midwife specialising in home births and natural childbirth. We had weekly training about natural techniques to make women more comfortable and help them get through childbirth. That was when I felt that I was really doing what I had dreamed of all along. The only reason I left London was because of the traffic.
After that I worked elsewhere in the UK, but, from 2012 on, it felt as if there was no freedom. Hospitals had a “risk midwife”, whose task was to reduce risk – not risk to mothers and babies, but risk to the hospital of being sued. The pressure was coming from the insurance companies that gave the hospitals litigation insurance. More and more protocols were implemented for all kinds of things. We were criticised if we didn’t refer families to the social services when they were deemed to be at risk. We were expected to refer mothers if they failed to turn up to three antenatal appointments. When management thought we had done something wrong, we might have a module to do to get our practice back on track. That was initiative deadening. We were not allowed to use our own judgement in what to say, what to recommend or what information we could offer. And because midwives were not allowed to do births with complications, like breech or twins, they lost their skills or never had the chance to acquire them.
Finally, in 2016, I took early retirement to get out of the system. In all my training, I had been told ‘midwifery is an autonomous profession’, but it seemed to have become completely controlled, and the reason I had gone into it just wasn’t there any more.
