Dr. Rebecca Dekker from Evidence-Based Birth, and Creating Change

Rebecca shares her first birth story – a highly medicalized hospital experience where she felt she had little agency or choice. Despite being a nurse with a master’s degree, she found herself subjected to numerous interventions that research later showed were unnecessary or potentially harmful.

“I was trying to people please. I’m trying to keep the peace and do as I’m told because I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers,” Rebecca explains about her first birth. “I think there is a reaction in us when we get pregnant to not want to make enemies, so it’s easier to kind of fall in line and just do as you’re told.”

This experience, which she later recognized as birth trauma, planted the seeds for her future work. “It wasn’t until maybe like seven years later or longer, I was talking with a nurse researcher named Dr. Cheryl Beck. She’s a world-leading researcher on birth trauma. And she looked me in the eye and she said, ‘Rebecca, that was a traumatic birth.’ And I was like, oh, I never permitted myself to even call it that.”

For her second pregnancy, Rebecca was determined to have a different experience. She researched extensively and chose a home birth with a midwife, though this came with challenges in the American healthcare system.

“I made a list of every little thing that happened to me during that first birth and looked up the research on it and realized I want something completely different the next time,” she shares. “I wanted to be able to labor in water. I didn’t want to be hooked up to monitors. I didn’t want to have an IV unless I needed it. I wanted to be able to move around, eat and drink freely, to push when my body told me I needed to push.”

Her second birth was a transformative home water birth, where she experienced the empowering feeling of birthing her 4.1kg baby in just 15 minutes of pushing – a stark contrast to the three hours of directed pushing with her first birth.

“I really felt as I was in that tub with the baby, holding that baby, that if I could do that, I could do anything. And it was the weirdest, most empowering feeling. And I felt like I was almost born again at that moment. It was a whole new world.”

Rebecca’s third birth came with its own challenges – a surprise pregnancy with uncertain dates that went well past 42 weeks. She shares her conflicted feelings about induction and hospital care, highlighting the complex decisions birthing people sometimes face.

“I was stuck in a bit of a bind… I didn’t know how they would react and by that point I already had Evidence-Based Birth and there was some friction between me and the hospital at that time because they knew I was publishing things that went against their practices.”

Throughout our conversation, Rebecca explains how these experiences led her to create Evidence-Based Birth®, which began as a simple blog to help a few people and has grown into a global resource with a team of thirteen.

“I thought maybe 12 people… I was like if I could just help 10 or 12 people avoid some of the suffering that I went through by having the information so that they can make choices for themselves. That’s all I cared about. I just wanted to help a few people. I didn’t have any other grand vision.”

The response to her work was immediate and powerful. “Every month the traffic to the website was doubling like an exponential increase. And within a few months, I knew something really big was happening. I didn’t really know what it was going to be, but I knew it was going to be big.”

Rebecca discusses how her work bridges the gap between medical research and accessible information for parents and birth professionals alike. “We take research from all around the world because you know there’s research happening in many countries and we publish it at evidencebasedbirth.com. Our goal is to kind of take things out behind the paywalls and in the medical journals and make it publicly available to anyone who has an interest in that topic.”

We also touch on the differences between healthcare systems in Australia and the US, and Rebecca shares details about her upcoming “Be the Change” virtual conference in March 2025, designed for birth professionals looking to implement evidence-based practices in their work.

“We’re focusing on learning about topics ranging from infertility all the way to postpartum and then implementing that. So we’re going to take what we learn and we’re going to have sessions on how do we take what we learned and put it into practice.”

This episode offers valuable insights into how personal experiences can drive meaningful change in maternal healthcare, and the importance of evidence-based information in empowering birthing choices. Rebecca’s journey from traumatized mother to influential advocate demonstrates how powerful our birth stories can be in creating positive change for others.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Evidence-Based Birth
• Be the Change Conference 2025
• Rebecca’s book: Babies Are Not Pizzas: They’re Born, Not Delivered