Kieran’s story

Content note: birth trauma, consent, emergency communication and an infant falling during an unexpected home birth.

The birth partner in the room: what I carried away from three births

I became a father through three very different births. I was not the person giving birth, and I do not claim that their experience belongs to me. I can only describe what I saw, heard, did and remember. But being a witness and a birth partner did not leave me untouched.

For years I struggled to explain what I had carried away from those rooms. I could recount events, but ordinary conversation flattened them. Eventually I wrote a song called Birth Stories. It became a way to speak plainly about the memories without identifying my family or the professionals involved, and without pretending that my perspective was the whole record.

During the first birth, labour lasted three days. From my perspective, we were repeatedly sent home while the pain and exhaustion continued. On our third visit I refused to leave. I remember being told that admission would only be possible if my partner received pethidine because that would require monitoring. They did not want or need it, but I experienced the decision as no real choice: accept it, or leave
without a bed.

After admission, I was told that I could not remain on the ward. I went home and was then called back urgently because the baby was coming. After the birth, I saw my partner left catheterised while the
baby lay out of reach at the end of the bed. I became angry and demanded help.

What stayed with me was the contradiction. I was expected to support my family, understand what was happening and step in when something was wrong, while also being treated as though I were only visiting. I did not have a clear place in the room. I was neither the patient nor a detached observer.

At the second birth, I watched a doctor pick up a scalpel and move towards an episiotomy. A midwife interrupted and asked whether consent was going to be obtained. My partner refused. I later made a formal complaint.

I am careful about how I describe this. I am not making a legal finding or claiming that I understood every clinical pressure in the room. What I can say is that I saw an intervention about to proceed before consent had been asked for, and that somebody else had to stop and raise the question. The memory altered how safe I felt in clinical settings. It taught me that a birth partner may notice something important, but may also be unsure whether they are permitted to speak.

The third birth happened unexpectedly at home. We had been preparing to drive to hospital when it became clear there was no longer time. I called 999.

I explained that I am autistic, that too much spoken information overwhelms me, and that I needed one instruction at a time. This was not a vague request. When several questions or directions arrive together, I can lose the sequence. I may still be trying to answer the first question while the second and third replace it.

The communication did not adapt. Questions and instructions kept arriving together. I became more flustered and less able to focus on what was happening in front of me.

At one point I was told to fetch towels. I was not told what they were for. I assumed they would be used to clean and wrap the baby after the birth. I did not understand that I was expected to use one to help catch them. When the baby arrived, they slipped through my hands and fell to the floor.

The baby was checked and was fine. I was the one left shaken.

That detail remains painful to write. I am not sharing it to blame an individual call handler, or to claim that one sentence would have made an emergency perfectly safe. I share it because the most important practical information was absent while other language kept arriving faster than I could process it.

The adjustment I had asked for required no equipment or paperwork: acknowledge the request, give one concrete action, explain its purpose when that changes how the action must be carried out, and wait for confirmation before adding the next instruction. In an emergency, accessible communication is not about comfort. It is about making vital information usable.

Across all three births, the circumstances were different, but I repeatedly felt the consequences of not being listened to. I also felt the uncertainty of being a father and birth partner whose role was essential yet poorly defined. I could be expected to advocate, remember instructions, notice risk and provide practical support, but my own fear and communication needs were easy to overlook.

That does not mean my trauma is the same as the trauma of the person who gave birth. It is not a competition, and centring birth partners should never silence mothers or other birthing people. The point is that trauma can spread through a room. A birth partner may leave with memories, guilt, anger or helplessness that remain long after the clinical emergency has ended.

I wrote Birth Stories because the refrain “Birth stories, war stories” kept returning to me. People often tell birth stories as family landmarks, but some of them are also accounts of endurance. The song is deliberately first person. It does not identify my partner, children, hospitals, clinicians or emergency personnel. It is not documentary proof of an identifiable place. It is the emotional record I was able to make.

If I could change one thing for other fathers and birth partners, it would be to treat them as participants with information and needs of their own. Ask what they understand. Listen when they identify a communication need. Explain the purpose of an instruction when that purpose changes the action. Make it clear that they may speak if they see a consent or safety concern. After a difficult birth, ask how they are too.

None of those steps requires pretending that the birth partner is the patient or that their account overrides anybody else's. It simply recognises that being beside trauma can be traumatic.

I am speaking now because silence did not make the memories disappear. Giving them a form — first in a song and now in writing — has helped me describe what happened without claiming ownership of anyone else's story. My hope is that another father or birth partner recognises that being shaken, years later, does not make them weak or disloyal. It means they were in the room, and the room came home with them.

Kieran Simkin's song Birth Stories
(https://kieransimkin.co.uk/birth-stories/) is a first-person account
of what he experienced during the births of his three children.

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