Molly O’Brien

Molly O’Brien is an experienced midwife with over 28 years in practice, more than 20 of which were spent working full time in clinical roles within the NHS. She is also a birth preparation teacher, associate university lecturer, and the creator of specialist education programmes in biomechanics for birth for midwives and other birth professionals.

A long-standing advocate of physiological birth and strong midwifery skills, Molly has campaigned for woman-centred models of care throughout her career, including campaigning for midwife-led birth units in 2000. Much of her clinical career was spent in settings that actively supported physiological birth, including five years as a team midwife in a maternity service with the highest home birth rate in the UK at the time, followed by more than nine years in a midwife-led unit. During this period, she attended hundreds of undisturbed physiological births, developing and refining the clinical skills at the heart of midwifery practice.

Witnessing the wide variation in normal labour physiology deepened her ability to recognise when birth was not progressing well and led her to explore the underlying causes of labour dystocia. This included examining the influence of pelvic health, modern sedentary lifestyles, increasing medicalisation, and the limited teaching of biomechanics within maternity education and training. From this work, she developed practical, respectful strategies to support labour progress using maternal movement and biomechanical techniques.

She is currently developing a sustainable Train the Trainer programme for NHS maternity units, designed to embed biomechanics for birth within local practice and support cultural change, alongside a parallel programme to integrate updated, physiology-based and biomechanical content into undergraduate and postgraduate university midwifery curricula. Through this work, Molly aims to strengthen midwifery education, protect physiological birth, and equip future generations of midwives with the skills and confidence to support women and babies safely and effectively.