After Birth is now in all good bookshops, including your local bookseller!This photo was taken in the award-winning Booka Bookshop in Oswestry, where I found my name alongside the inimitable Maisie Hill, the actual Jilly Cooper, and a fantastic women's health physio whose videos I recommend you look up called Megan Vickers.
After Birth came out on 27 May 2021, and was launched with a fantastic evening event at Moreton Hall, my alma mater, in Shropshire. You can watch the video of it here. I am grateful to everyone who has supported me and the book since its inception four or so years ago – the first women who spoke to me about their private experiences, the many professionals who gave so generously of their time, and my friends and family who were so supportive throughout. Writing a book under lockdown during a global pandemic with a two year old whilst pregnant doesn't exactly make for ideal writing conditions, but we did it! |
The Bookseller: Souvenir Press will publish postpartum advice book by Hatcher-Moore
It’s time we started to talk openly and honestly about postpartum health, and I hope After Birth will provide the support that so many women desperately need but are not getting from their healthcare system. I really believe women are ready to cast off the paternalistic assumption that they’d rather not know how childbirth can change them. After all, it’s the gap between expectation and reality that so often floors us."
Background to the book
"Jessica will take a broad look at what women can do for themselves at home and how to seek expert care when they need it. Looking at practices in the UK and around the world, After Birth will reassure, inform and empower women to reclaim their post-birth bodies" – Senior Commissioning Editor Cindy Chan at Souvenir Press
Before moving to North Wales, I lived in Nairobi, Kenya, where I worked as a foreign correspondent and spent most of my time on the road covering the crises and crises of East Africa. I interviewed the most extraordinary women imaginable: teenagers raising the children of their rapists, women recovering from birth with no clean water let alone nappies, and mothers bringing up children in isolation, ostracised by a taboo birth injury, a fistula, that left them leaking urine for life.
I learned how devastating women’s health problems can be, but also how resilient women can be in the face of adversity. Not once did it occur to me that the mothers I knew back home might have faced comparable, albeit less acute, challenges. Naively, I thought leaking wee for months on end affected mothers who couldn’t access healthcare, not me. I had no idea that women across all social strata in the UK endure pain for years after birth. For some reason, I even imagined that women who stayed at home cooking, cleaning and caring for screaming babies after their husbands departed each morning with kiss and a “good luck” were not like me. When I married Phil, a photographer I’d met covering the civil war in Somalia, I was a woman thriving in a man’s world; gender inequality didn’t affect me. After we retreated to the hills of North Wales and had a baby, however, I realised how naive I’d been.
Nothing can prepare you for childbirth or what comes next, but at least we attempt to prepare for childbirth; women typically put little or no thought into their own physical and mental recovery afterwards the first time around. My experience of the postnatal period, and the experiences of friends and other women I've met since giving birth, moved me to write a book that I felt was missing. After Birth combines memoir, the stories of other women, evidence-based recommendations and the opinions of medical professionals drawn from a range of medical disciplines to provide information, support and straight-talking advice.
A lot of the issues I deal with in the book are considered taboo; I think it’s time we started to talk openly and honestly about postpartum health, and I hope After Birth will provide the support that so many women desperately need but are not getting from their healthcare system. I really believe women are ready to cast off the paternalistic assumption that they’d rather not know how childbirth can change them. After all, it’s the gap between expectation and reality that so often floors us.
I learned how devastating women’s health problems can be, but also how resilient women can be in the face of adversity. Not once did it occur to me that the mothers I knew back home might have faced comparable, albeit less acute, challenges. Naively, I thought leaking wee for months on end affected mothers who couldn’t access healthcare, not me. I had no idea that women across all social strata in the UK endure pain for years after birth. For some reason, I even imagined that women who stayed at home cooking, cleaning and caring for screaming babies after their husbands departed each morning with kiss and a “good luck” were not like me. When I married Phil, a photographer I’d met covering the civil war in Somalia, I was a woman thriving in a man’s world; gender inequality didn’t affect me. After we retreated to the hills of North Wales and had a baby, however, I realised how naive I’d been.
Nothing can prepare you for childbirth or what comes next, but at least we attempt to prepare for childbirth; women typically put little or no thought into their own physical and mental recovery afterwards the first time around. My experience of the postnatal period, and the experiences of friends and other women I've met since giving birth, moved me to write a book that I felt was missing. After Birth combines memoir, the stories of other women, evidence-based recommendations and the opinions of medical professionals drawn from a range of medical disciplines to provide information, support and straight-talking advice.
A lot of the issues I deal with in the book are considered taboo; I think it’s time we started to talk openly and honestly about postpartum health, and I hope After Birth will provide the support that so many women desperately need but are not getting from their healthcare system. I really believe women are ready to cast off the paternalistic assumption that they’d rather not know how childbirth can change them. After all, it’s the gap between expectation and reality that so often floors us.
