
We lost ourselves in the dreary dreamy morning and only after asking a passer-by for the time did we then run to the County Court to meet our community friends and persecuted midwife, Sally. Sally is another independent midwife hunted by a nanny-state that foregrounds institutional hysteria over feminine intuition, ethics and rights. One of the central arguments against her was that the public needs protection from such risk, yet outside the court the state was ratifying cars, Coke and climate change. Ideologies of mass toxicity and pollution reign in an abuser’s paradise while loving independent midwives are deemed a threat to ‘the public’.

Today, Sally’s verdict was basically the final nail in the coffin of her long practice as an independent midwife and marks a further erosion of rights for women. The legal costs and the rulings handed down from the so-called expert panel have made it impossible for her to appeal and keep practicing. A number of us, as representatives of all who love and respect Sally, rose early to travel for a few hours to support her. This is a person who was awarded the highest acknowledgement in our community at the International Women’s Day Honour Roll celebrations two years ago.

Sally’s great mistake was that she spent more time adorning, caressing, heartening and massaging the mothers she cared for and not enough time filling out forms and following a patriarchal-Cartesian regime of risk assessment and legal accountability. All the letters from the mothers of the births under investigation were ignored, and so too the fact that the overwhelming majority of mothers Sally tended were able to birth in the manner that respected their wishes, free from the panic of obstetrics, clock-time and legal risk assessors that shape all decisions a birthing ward makes. If any mothers had written criticism of Sally we’re sure this would have been used against her, but instead all our letters of support relating to her case were blatantly ignored.


Today we thought about those who are persecuted; the likes of Julian Assange, Ned and Sally. All three are bound by a staunch belief in peoples’ basic rights for self-determination. All three share various experiences of homeschooling and all three have been cowardly persecuted by those who wish to control us.