John Pendleton on Rethinking Midwifery: Gender, Power, and Care

Description

A home birth at 2 a.m. changed everything. John Pendleton swapped the BBC’s long-form documentaries for the long arc of labour, finding the same core craft in both worlds: showing up, listening deeply, and holding space through life-changing moments. We trace his path from community midwife to senior lecturer, and how a planned PhD on third stage physiology morphed into a bracing inquiry about gender, power, and presence in the birth room.

We talk candidly about why people choose midwifery—and why many leave in years three to five. Younger cohorts are arriving straight from school while funding gaps, means-tested allowances, and a rising cost of living push placements and part-time work into the same week. Continuity-of-carer promises better outcomes but collides with childcare at 2 a.m. AI may streamline admin, but hands-on, relational care remains the human core. The hard question is practical: how do we build wraparound support so midwives can deliver the care families want without burning themselves out?

John opens the black box of his research: an interpretive phenomenological study asking what it’s like for men working as midwives. The answers live in details—where you stand, how you seek consent, when you offer a chaperone—and reveal how gender operates as power, not just identity. That lens widened into a hotly debated paper on gender-inclusive language and whether “midwife” still serves everyone we care for. The media firestorm missed the nuance, but the academic work stands: read to think, not to react. Along the way, we dig into decolonising midwifery education, teaching cultural humility, and why rigorous mentorship in physiological birth still matters.