Using a narrative format Joy Horner shares a personal and professional history of learning to support vaginal breech working with British Midwife Mary Cronk MBE. This presentation seeks to tell the stories of breech births attended as part of her Independent Midwifery practice. Clients have shared photos of their births for teaching purposes. The images include home births of footling and frank breech presentations, breech VBAC, hospital breech birth and caesarean delivery.

Within the context of physiological birthing, this session seeks to address the recurring theme of how breech birth skills have been lost, so women and birthing people are not always offered the chance to birth naturally, without interference, in hospital. This leads to women seeking out skilled care at home. The information is given from perspective a skilled care-provider, the narrative format seeks to include the voices of birthing women who triumph over adversity, when they have been told they can’t or shouldn’t try to birth their breech babies vaginally and they do it anyway.

Included amongst the triumphs are the harsh realities: a cord prolapse at home and an unexpected stillbirth. Also, a poignant story of planned breech birth in hospital which ended in an emotionally moving caesarean. Joy seeks to develop a birthing community of shared wisdom. Midwives do face and survive investigations after poor outcomes, and from those experiences they can draw extra strength and knowledge.

At the end of this session we will have learnt:
-That a variety of breech presentations that can be born vaginally.
-How skilled birth attendants can facilitate spontaneous breech birth.
-Assessing when additional support is required during a breech birth.
-The impact on parents and practitioners when a breech baby dies.
-Joy’s approach to effect change in breech birth care and how this can be replicated.

About Joy

Joy Horner is a former midwife who left the Nursing and Midwifery Council register in 2021 to become a Birthkeeper. She currently works as a perinatal consultant Preparing families for sacred pregnancy and birth, providing specialised services for those who have suffered perinatal trauma, and teaches and mentors other birth workers. She has written many online courses for parents and professionals, and is launching her signature Birthkeeper’s Path Course in 2025.

Joy was a health professional for 37 years, a registered midwife for over 20 years and an independent midwife for 16 years. She worked in a variety of birth settings including home, stand alone and co-located birth centres and obstetric units.

She has a diploma in childbirth education, completed a year-long shamanic midwifery course with Jane Hardwicke Collings, and has taught internationally alongside the likes of Mary Cronk, Ina May Gaskin, Gail Tully, Jan Tritten etc. She is also a trustee of a local baby loss charity called Towards Tomorrow Together.

She currently embraces the title of Wise Woman on The Hill, as named by her eldest son. When she’s not working with birth and death, attending births, and running online courses, she likes to attend live music festivals and makes hand-built ceramics. She considers herself part selkie, and longs to return to the sea – if only it wasn’t so damned cold! She has 2 grown up children, and lives in Glastonbury with a very understanding husband, and 3 cats.