It caught me off guard. For a second, I sat with it. Not because the answer was complicated, but because the question itself did something. It turned the lens back on me. It asked me, without warning, to place myself on one side of a line, in front of another person, in a moment I had not chosen.

Most people a woman meets in pregnancy come and go. The birth worker is often the one who stays. For a survivor of sexual abuse, that steady, trusted relationship can be the reason she feels safe enough to be seen. This is why trauma-informed care matters so much in birth work, and what it asks of those who walk alongside women through a system that too often cannot see what they carry.

For years I watched women who seemed calm and prepared go somewhere else in labour, and I thought I was failing them. Understanding sexual trauma changed everything. This is why SAFER Birth exists.