The skincare brand breaking pregnancy taboos for women everywhere

Let’s talk about vaginal tearing.

Why? Because nine out of 10 women experience everything from small, skin-deep tears to deep, traumatising wounds whilst giving birth, but there is a growing movement among childbirth professionals and laypeople to hide this reality, to pretend it doesn’t happen.

Despite calls for greater transparency and communication to expectant mothers about the reality of giving birth (including from the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists), there is a vocal and influential minority who believe that talking about the reality of giving birth is unnecessarily traumatising for women. Catriona Jones, a lecturer in midwifery at the University of Hull, is one such example. 

Back in 2018, she told the British Science Festival that women sharing their childbirth experiences on social media was partly to blame for rising incidences of tocophobia, an intense fear and anxiety of pregnancy and childbirth.

“If you go on to any of the Mumsnet forums, there are women telling their stories of childbirth: ‘oh, it was terrible, it was a bloodbath, this and that happened.’ I think that can be quite frightening for women to engage with and read about,” she said.

Her stance is pretty measured compared to some approaches to childbirth, like hypnobirthing. One book, by Marie Mongan, the self-styled founder of hypnobirthing, claims: “The HypnoBirthing method is an act of nature and not medical menipulation (sic). Using the HypnoBirthing exercises – positive thinking, visualisation, breathing and physical preparation – will lead to a happy and comfortable pregnancy.”

The idea that being pregnant and giving birth can, and should be comfortable, flies in the face of the statistics and is part of the reason Lesley Gilchrist set up My Expert Midwife, a skincare brand designed specifically for pregnant women and new mums.

Selling a range of aromatherapy balms, oils and sprays, Gilchrist, a trained midwife, has positioned her business as an antidote to the growing culture of denial about the experience most women have pre and post-childbirth.

“Throughout my time at the NHS and in private practices looking after women, the overarching theme was infantilisation. We were always taught not to use the word pain in case it frightened them,” says Gilchrist.

“It’s a throwback to the 40s and 50s where women were always treated like a delicate flower – ‘you can’t be honest with them in case they start crying’.”

It wasn’t until she began her masters, a study of clinical research methods in childbirth trauma, that she realised the voices advocating the no-pain doctrine were in fact in a minority. Small, but loud and influential.

“Back in the early 2000s, there was a minority that assumed their view was shared by everyone. So, we had a situation where midwives were teaching anti-natal classes terrified to use the word pain and women were being denied the reality of childbirth.

“Post-birth trauma clinics had to be set up as women were being left traumatised by the reality of childbirth. Women enjoyed the anti-natal classes because they were being told what they wanted to hear but they were completely unprepared for childbirth.”

She believes this is driven by too much emphasis being placed upon the advice of lay people over the expertise and experience of professional midwives.

“[Laypeople] blur the lines [between medical and emotional support]. A lot of the advice and information given to women has a bias attached to it, but it is taken over and above the information given by midwives. If I have a confirmation bias, I can find research to back my idea. But as professionals, we are trained to be able to distinguish that bias.”

While her belief in being honest about what is coming for most mothers-to-be wasn’t the sole driver behind setting up the business, it comes through in spades in the branding – Spritz for Bitz, No Harm Nipple Balm and No Harm Bum Balm.

Designed by her fellow midwives and a team of clinicians, Gilchrist’s aromatherapy range makes no apologies for its in-your-face approach to marketing.

“Women love talking about their birth and the gorier the better. ‘I had 176 stitches’ – it’s a badge of honour. Women like to tell those stories, but they are almost being silenced,” claims Gilchrist.

“Some of these people advising women don’t like talking about incontinence during childbirth but that is part of evolution. As a midwife we will say 90 per cent of women will poo on their baby and nature has designed it that way as it provides exposure to bacteria.

“But when you poll women about the scariest things around giving birth, pooing and tearing will be the top ones. So, when we launched the brand, we decided to stop the nonsense of not talking about taboo subjects. We are going to stop pregnancy and labour being this hidden thing in a box.”

And it seems her warts and all approach to childbirth is appealing to the nation’s baby-havers with near-unanimously favourable reviews to the products which can be found online and on the shelves of leading high street brands such as Boots, JoJo and Next.

She credits much of the appeal to the fact that her products are focused entirely on the mother, rather than the child.

“Boots recognised that everything was geared towards baby and there was nothing for mums,” she says.

“Our big thing is asking why women are seen as this goddess when she is giving birth and after, it’s all about the baby.”

It is this focus on the mother and treating her like an adult that has seen My Expert Midwife carve out an increasingly lucrative niche in a post-birth market that has turned its back on mothers.

Gilchrist says turnover has been doubling every year since the 2017 launch, shipping 300,000 bottles of spritz in that time. And she aims to keep expanding that range in direct response to the needs of her customers.

A team of midwives provide one-to-one consultations free of charge with the output of those consultations feeding directly into the company’s R&D programme.

Gilchrist is fully aware that there are risks in taking on the accepted wisdom of what is good for expectant mothers in such a blunt, forthright way. But as a natural gambler, it is a risk she’s willing to take in what she sees as the pursuit of truth and rationality in an area where concrete research is thin on the ground.

“There’s this idea that childbirth has been happening since time immemorial and that it is natural so doesn’t require much attention or research. It was an area of medicine that was governed by men and hasn’t really moved on,” she says.

“Nobody is allowed to talk about the reality of birth. It’s the safe space thing.”

And it is that mindset that Gilchrist is hoping she can shift, one Spritz for Bitz at a time, to a more realistic view that embraces childbirth in all its gory glory.