Helen Fairlie – Born London

How I got here

After 15 years in consultancy and design, heading up the teams creating amazing brands like Sipsmith, Tyrrells and Freddie’s Flowers, I fell pregnant with my little boy Rory. We signed up to a hypnobirthing course and that gave me the knowledge, confidence and calm I really relied on when it came to his birth. I found the whole thing totally mind blowing (in a good way) and hugely empowering.

While I was on maternity leave I started volunteering at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, working with their Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP) to help improve maternity services. As a group, we run everything from focus groups for different ethnic groups to ‘15 steps’ programmes around the hospitals in the trust, brainstorming and instigating positive change with the consultant midwives and their teams.

Working with these amazing people and falling pregnant with my little girl, India, inspired me to study for my Diploma in KGHypnobirthing – a course accredited by the Royal College of Midwives – so that I could teach hypnobirthing to others. I was lucky enough to train with Katharine Graves herself who, amongst many other things, sits on the council of the Royal Society of Medicine’s Maternity and Newborn Forum.

Rory’s arrival had really piqued my interest in water births and I gained a place on the ‘Paramana Doula’ course with the internationally renowned obstetrician who pioneered the whole concept. I spent three eye-opening days with Dr. Michel Odent, listening to his learnings on pregnancy and birth psychology from his 60+ year career in the industry and the publication of his 15 books in 22 languages.

India was in far too much of a rush to join the world to be interested in a water birth but it really showed me how, despite two totally different birth experiences, all the above had allowed me to feel in control and remember both events hugely positively.

Why Born London?

We read the books, sign up to the newsletters, do everything we can to make sure we’re doing the best for our baby during pregnancy. But when it comes to birth, we only see it dramatised in films or hear about it in friends’ (often horror) stories. Our amazing midwives don’t have the time to correct all that in our routine antenatal appointments and our friends don’t want to shout about their great birth experiences in case they sound like they’re showing off. So the birth part ends up feeling weirdly out of our control, like it’s just luck on the day.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. We’re intelligent women and there’s stuff we can do even if nobody can guarantee exactly how our baby will make their grand entrance (just like anything else in life). We want to remove the fear factor – by understanding the physiology of our bodies, what they might do and why. We want to work with our bodies – by having a bunch of tools and techniques up our sleeves and using the power of our minds (like how sports psychology would help you break through ‘the wall’ in a marathon). We want to make informed decisions – by understanding our healthcare system and the decades of medical research into birth place, analgesia etc. And we want our birth partners to play a pivotal role – to advocate for us, to help keep us calm and to feel part of the whole thing.

I had a bit of a realisation that, if I could distill down the knowledge and experiences I’d benefitted from, I could empower other women and their birth partners to create a really positive narrative around birth. So I left the day job, founded Born London® and partnered with UNICEF to run birth courses with benefits that last a lifetime.