/ (min cost $ 0 ) or signup to continue reading In the first two-hundred odd submissions which trickled on to the NSW Birth Trauma Inquiry website last August, . I'd been following the inquiry for a couple of months at that point, and had run several stories about and from Illawarra women. The inquiry had started after a group of 30 women in banded together to at Wagga Base Hospital.
Some of the submissions included and a woman who was cut before the epidural took hold in an emergency c-section. It also quickly became clear to me this was an issue that ran deep in the Illawarra, but seeing all the submissions there in black and white was still a shock. They made for tough reading, so I can't imagine what it took for all the people who submitted them to relive their own trauma and write it down.
In the end, the inquiry got more than 4000 submissions from women across NSW and all over Australia as it cracked open an issue which some experts estimate affects as many as one in three women. There were six public hearings, including one in Wollongong and one in Wagga. Some of the stories ACM's told included that of - who was one of six Illawarra woman who spoke publicly at the hearing about their experience.
The Dapto mother's face crumpled with tears as she described to the panel how she had been forced to watch her five-hour-old stillborn baby be placed in a styrofoam box by police at Wollongong Hospital before having to spend the night in the maternity ward surrounded by newborn.
