Taking Big Birthas to Med Soc

Last year, I got involved in a wonderfully exciting research project called the Parenting Science Gang. This involved parents being recruited, trained in research techniques, and then deciding what to research, how to do it, and carrying out the research and analysing the data. The particular strand of the Parenting Science Gang I was involved in was the Big Birthas project - investgating choices for pregnant women who had a 'high BMI'.

When the project ended, we Parents Scientists were left with the data and the findings. My day job then was as both a doula and a researcher, and I am passionate about choices in birth for all, regardless of BMI. I also had a high BMI in one of my own pregnancies. Some of the stories women had shared with us were heartbreaking - stories of having choice and power taken away from them, and of being upset and traumatised as a result. Some of the stories were also uplifting, when women took power back, through asserting their rights to make choices and decisions about themselves, their bodies, and their babies. Women had shared so much with us, giving up time and investing work into telling us their stories, and I wanted to make sure we do justice to that. 

One way I could do that was to present our findings to a diverse range of audiences. In my day job, I frequently present research findings to conferences of academics, so I applied to present the Big Birthas findings to a conference. The conference I chose was the British Sociological Association’s ‘Medical Sociology’ conference. It is a brilliant conference, focused not on what we do medically within health care, but how we do things, why we do things, and how we could do health care better.

My talk was accepted, in a format called Pecha Kucha. These presentations allow you to present 20 slides, and talk about each one for 20 seconds. It’s a challenging format because it makes you really focus hard on what the key points are that you want to make. There is no room for waffle! I wrote the both the initial application and the presentation collaboratively with several of the other Parent Scientist, using the Facebook group to refine ideas and try things out, in the same way we had used it during the Parenting Science Gang project. It was lovely to have that very supportive and equal way of working, which is quite different from how most academic and medical presentations are created.

I chose to focus on one of our findings, the idea of the ‘high BMI box’. Many women told us about how, once they were in this box, their BMI was the only thing that anyone seemed interested in. They told tales of having serious medical conditions ignored, because so much focus was on the 'high BMI box'. One woman explained how the difference between her starting weight in her two pregnancies was objectively only 7 pounds, but one made her ‘normal BMI’, and the other saw her put into the ‘high BMI box’. She eloquently described the differences this made to her care.

The presentation was well received, and questions were asked after the talk about both the Parenting Science Gang methodology, and the Big Birthas methodology and findings. People talked about how our research overlapped with bits of the work they were doing.

The Parenting Science Gang’s project may be over, but the journey for the stories we collected as Parent Scientists is not. Next, I am hoping to work with some of the other Parent Scientists to turn our findings into a piece that can be published in a midwifery journal. Watch this space…