The Sheffield Maternity Cooperative is a collective of people who feel passionately about community support throughout the perinatal experience. We are midwives, birth workers, families and people who share a commitment to birth – the path to it, through and beyond – being a community event supported by culturally safe health care.
We strive to support all aspects of reproductive healthcare, including abortion and baby loss of any kind – no matter whether your experience is current or years ago.
We were founded in 2019 by a group of midwives who wanted to find solutions to problems existing in traditional maternity services and provide support to groups of people whose voices and experiences are often excluded from mainstream maternity care.
We offer pre-conception, antenatal and postnatal support, loss support, knowledge-sharing and advocacy for pregnant people and their families in Sheffield and beyond. Since the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic our services have moved online and we have been able to reach people all over the country. We support people who are currently going through fertility treatment, or who have experienced miscarriage, abortion and loss.
We strive to ensure people whose voices are most often not heard are supported. Together we have decades of professional and lived experience that have helped us to see the following people often face more inequalities and disadvantages in standard maternity care:
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Families of colour
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People in the immigration system, such as people seeking asylum and those with refugee status
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Families who have previously had traumatic or disempowering contact with maternity services
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Transgender, intersex and queer people
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Families who do not have a ‘typical’ structure, for example single parents, co-parents and polyamorous families.
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People who have experience of bereavement, miscarriage, abortion and loss in maternity
Our services are ‘contribute what you can’, which means that those who can afford to pay do, and this supports the places of those who are unable to contribute financially.
We are a Cooperative registered with Cooperatives UK, which means no one profits from our activity and you can become a member of our organisation to help shape the work we do. Members may support our services with a financial contribution, volunteer to support the SMC’s work, or suggestions to improve our work. You don’t have to be a birth worker or currently pregnant to be a member.