Birth belongs to the family

Nicole Lawal trained as a midwife with ARU. She's since founded a group that advocates for Black and mixed heritage women, and families, in the weeks surrounding birth. Here, Nicole shares her story.

I qualified as a midwife in 2011. I had no idea where that decision would take me – or what it would cost me to truly understand the work I had chosen.

From the ward to the data

My early career was in NHS maternity services, and I loved it. But when I moved into a specialist audit role, something shifted. I started seeing the patterns in the data that the ward had not let me sit with long enough to name: that outcomes in maternity care were not equally distributed, and that race was one of the clearest lines of division.

A different way of working

In 2017, my husband and I made a leap of faith and moved our young family to Aotearoa New Zealand. I practised as a Lead Maternity Carer – holding full clinical responsibility for women from early pregnancy through to postnatal discharge. Later, as a Link Lecturer at Auckland University of Technology, I encountered Māori birth philosophy for the first time. It placed the whānau – the extended family – at the centre of birth. The midwife was not the authority. She was the kaitiaki: the guardian, the safety net. Practising within that framework changed me permanently.

Coming home to something I could not ignore

In 2020, pregnant with my fourth child, I returned to the UK during a pandemic. And I came back changed. I had spent four years inside a model that centred women – their families, their instincts, their authority over their own birth. Coming home made the contrast impossible to sit with. Friends, family members, and then my own experience of maternity care as a Black woman confirmed what I already knew was missing. It was not just that Black women were not being heard. It was that I had seen what being heard actually looked like – and this was not it.

Doing something about it

In 2022, I founded B3 – Bumps, Birth and Belonging CIC – a community interest company centring Black and mixed heritage women in the perinatal period. From that, Purpose Led Consulting grew: my professional education and advisory practice, where I develop CPD programmes for midwives and work with NHS Trusts and voluntary sector organisations. My flagship course, Birth Belongs to the Family, draws directly on the Māori community-centred philosophy I encountered in Aotearoa. Every piece of work I do goes back to the same belief: that birth belongs to the family, and the midwife’s highest purpose is to hold the space – not take it.

Read more

Research at ARU is examining the effect of health inequalities on pregnancy outcomes. Read more about the project.