‘Speaking of Birth’ is a sixty-minute English-language recording launched on CD and broadcast as a radio programme in the UK in September 2006. It is an oral history project in which the diverse experiences of a dozen first-time mothers in the English city of Brighton & Hove are recounted with humour, frankness and passion.
Following the birth of my daughter I found it enormously supportive to talk to the women I met at local post-natal and mother-and-baby groups. Like me, many of the new mothers had a strong desire to discuss and to share their individual experiences of childbirth. As our conversations progressed, I began to understand that few births conform to our expectations.
I decided to record and make permanent the women’s stories, to provide a snapshot of childbirth in my home city. I approached the community radio station Resonance104.4fm (based in London, but available worldwide on the web: www.resonancefm.com), which expressed interest in broadcasting such a programme. They lent me a minidisc recorder and a microphone so that I was able to start recording interviews. I soon found that what I had in mind was growing increasingly complex. First I needed to edit the fifteen hours of interviews and throw them into a manageable shape. Secondly I wanted to realise a compact disc version of the project so that it had a life beyond a few radio broadcasts.
To fund this I applied to Awards For All, a UK lottery grants scheme for local community projects. This grant allowed me to edit and master the interviews on a home computer and to pay for a thousand compact discs to be pressed. Brighton University Illustration graduate Imogen Shaw designed the CD artwork for me. Over the course of nine months, while my baby napped, I managed to complete the project.
The CD was launched in Brighton in September 2006. Baby-food manufacturers Organix sponsored the party, thrown to thank the mothers who took part in the project. At the same time ‘Speaking of Birth’ received its first broadcast on Resonance Fm.
The broadcast has had a great response, with other UK community radio stations (there are now over 100 in the country) expressing an interest in it. Further afield, the Portuguese Doula’s Association have been inspired to create something similar for Portugal’s Radio Zero. In the US, Thin Air Media is producing a similar-themed audio documentary about the practices and perceptions of birth in America, which is due to air in the US in March 2007.
Speaking of Birth now has a dedicated MySpace community page (www.myspace.com/speakingofbirth), with some 290 like-minded individuals and groups registered as friends.
I hope that ‘Speaking of Birth’ will prove informative about the complexities of childbirth - and will inspire other women to share their personal experiences.
The CD of Speaking of Birth is available at www.speakingofbirth.com.
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