Knowing Your Body Through Birthing and Beyond with Lacey Barratt

Bringing new life into the world is brutal. You are so freaking over being a giant, hormonal mess by the end of the pregnancy, and if you’re a first-time parent, you’re wondering how this whole “birth” thing is supposed to work. You might feel as if you don’t have the confidence to ask the right questions, for fear of sounding like you don’t know anything.

Well hey, you probably don’t know much, and that’s totally okay. Although you might have heard your fair share of (probably gross) birth stories, it doesn’t mean that you’re any wiser as to what it’s going to be like for you. And the truth is, every, single birth story is different. That’s something my guest today, birth photographer and all-around boss babe, Lacey Barratt has learned from her many years photographing births for her clients.

Lacey Barratt is a pioneer in the birth industry, paving the way for a more inclusive, dynamic, and unapologetically raw content through visual arts. As a doula, she pushes the boundaries of what women think they are capable of; helping them to break free of any societal norms or standards by understanding they are their own individual with individual needs. Lacey makes sure that her imagery is nothing less than artful and educational, striving to help women gain knowledge through her images.

Some Topics That We Cover:

  • Using birth photography to open up the conversation and educate women
  • What birth looks like for one person, is completely different to what it looks like to another
  • How birth has become somewhat of an “express service” for some
  • We’re losing touch with the way birth is naturally supposed to occur
  • How to get back in touch with who you are, and what your body needs
  • It’s okay to not be excited about an unexpected or unplanned pregnancy, and ways to work through this
  • There’s no one way to birth a child, find what feels safe for you and your body
  • Don’t be afraid to ask your doctor questions and lots of them
  • Surround yourself with like-minded people who you can be open with, and who won’t judge the way you choose to raise your children. There’s no one way.
  • Work on your self-awareness so that you can understand your body more fully

Read the Full Podcast Transcript Below

Click Me to Open!

Angela: Hello, everybody. It is me, Angela Gallo, and you are tuning in to my podcast, Slaying the Status Quo in Total F-ing Style, an audio sensory feast that I have curated explicitly to celebrate every girl, woman and non-binary powerhouse impacting the world, changing their communities and doing a heap of good simply by showing up as their most expressed selves and challenging the status quo.

Buckle up, hold on to your womb, your panties or whatever the hell it is you’re wearing, including your birthday suit because it’s going to be one hell of a ride.

Angela: Welcome to episode three of Slaying the Status Quo in Total Fucking Style. The last few episodes have been a roaring success and have left me weepy and moved and wet and today is going to be no different. We have the amazing Lacey Barratt, who is a friend as much as a colleague as much as someone that is and has been in my circle for a number of years now, who really does embody everything it means to be whoever the fuck it is I want to be all the while leaving room and grace to grow and evolve and be the best person I can be.
Without further ado, let us welcome Lacey Barratt.

Lacey: Hello. Thank you for that, Angela.

Angela: Did you just clap?

Lacey: I did.

Angela: [laughs]

Lacey: Is that weird that I clap for myself?

Angela: That just made that intro significantly better. Babe, I would love for you to tell people who it is you are and what it is you do.

Lacey: I am Lacey Barratt. I am a birth photographer, a doula, a videographer. I like to speak through visual art as well as incredible words, word porn. I have really deep values and that is that women have a choice, that women have power and that we get to execute it however the fuck we want to do it. I like to use my visual arts, my work to be able to expand on that thought and I use my words to also expand on that thought, so I really enjoy posting.
I like to call it thought-provoking, other people like to call it controversial, but I think that’s bullshit.

Angela: Excuse me, thought-provoking content and controversy is the basis of any good social media strategy-

Lacey: It is. I like to be the voice of women who don’t think that they have the balls to say it themselves, so, what every woman is thinking that doesn’t say it, I’ll fucking say it.

Angela: I have just been waiting patiently for you to get to the place that I wanted you to be at, but I didn’t want to force you to go to, so it’s been so cool watching you come into that really soulful part of yourself because you didn’t really show that for many years and this is how we are, right? We’re in the throws of motherhood and depression and anxiety and we’re working and we’re hustling and relationships and it’s difficult to do that, and it’s been really, really cool to see you step into this realm this year where you’re using your words a lot more profoundly.
You’re really showing your beliefs, your values, your ethos in a way that’s a lot more confident because, yes, you used to struggle with that before when people used to just– Well, I mean they ripped us both new ones all over Instagram.

Lacey: They did.

Angela: I’m really proud of you and I’m proud of you for stepping into that power. How has birth photography or doing mentoring and coaching these people, these professionals, bringing you into this sphere that has allowed you to be more vocal about your beliefs and your values and your ethos in a really vulnerable, public way?

Lacey: I think birth photography has been that stepping stone because I have this saying that I like to say that birth is sacred, not secret. I really feel like using my images as a stepping stone to be able to open up the conversation of things that people aren’t really willing to talk about. Using that as an educational tool to open up those conversations is what I’ve been using birth photography for.

As time went on, it’s evolved into seeing other birth photographers struggling in their business and I feel like, as women, we are expected to nurture and when we’re in a job description such as birth work that we’re expected to do it for free or cheap because that’s what we do anyway. We’re women, we’re nurturers, so how dare we charge for it. As the journey evolved from advocacy on my personal Lacey Barratt page and then evolved into helping women build thriving and sustainable birth photography businesses and retire their partners if they want to or travel or whatever that success looks like for that individual because, obviously, that’s going to be different for everybody.

Just being able to advocate in a way that it doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be easy. You’re making this way bigger of a thing than what it really is. Just do it and let’s make it as simple as possible. [laughs]

Angela: Yes. You know as well, your ability to bring into this work who it is you really are is that you’re perfectly positioned to be in a body of work where women and birthing people are showing their most honest selves, where they are going into the place that is intimate, that is exposed and so it’s just actually really quite beautiful that you, at the same time, creating a course exposing birth photography, you have exposed yourself to yourself and to the public.

That’s been really, really poetic to see unfold as well. This is a little backstory for everybody. I moved to Malvern at 36 weeks pregnant, 35 or 36 weeks pregnant, I don’t remember right now, but it’s very, very late and I, of course, needed to then find a doula and a birth photographer. You were in Darwin at the time and this is where this whole story starts because then you ended up in Malvern and you did the pictures.

You photographed Odin’s birth, and the coolest part I feel about this is that it’s no coincidence that Lacey and I are living in the same city, definitely not a coincidence.

Lacey: No, no.

Angela: And it’s not a coincidence we’re in the same circles because it’s not even the fact of anything else other than me being who it is I want to be boldly has inspired you to do that and you doing that has inspired me to do that. As such, it’s really been a cyclonic effort in the last few years where this show is about challenging the status quo. When we first became friends, breastfeeding wasn’t even allowed, images of breastfeeding were not allowed on Instagram and on Facebook.

In just five years, I don’t know if you’ve realized that, but we’ve managed to collectively get breastfeeding images allowed, then birth images allowed, and so there’s been a lot that has shifted because, in my opinion, of the radical visibility of birth, postpartum photography on social media and because of people-

Lacey: Hell yes.

Angela: I think it’s just so cool. Now, what do you fell and what has been the most exciting part about challenging all of the status quos in the birth and postpartum world?

Lacey: I think it’s making women think and birthing people think because we see The Handmaid’s Tale and we see all of these birthing scenes in various Hollywood movies and we have this preconceived notion of what we think birth is. This is what I do with part of my doula clients and I won’t get into that too much, but we need to start unpacking that. We have completely lost touch with the women who have birthed before us because we are so in mainstream media right now that we don’t even know what birth is.

What is it supposed to look like? Well, that’s what it looked like for this person, so maybe that’s what it’s supposed to look like for me. What we’ve done, essentially, is we have said, “Okay, women, birthing people, you are no longer the expert, the doctor is, the midwife is, the anesthetist is, the pediatrician is. Anything that you know about your body now is false and you need to listen to what we have to say.”

We’ve completely discredited ourselves as the expert of our own bodies that we’ve now put our trust into somebody else and it’s completely derailed what birth is and the perception of what birth brings to people.

Angela: We’ve taken what should be a trek and a journey and a shamanic process and something that’s deep and long because it requires that length of time and that container and that arduousness and that sweetness and that sour in order to learn, in order to cultivate the lessons and the gifts we need into an express checkout service. By doing that, we’ve essentially taken everything that is mystical and deep that has existed since the beginning of time and we’ve traded it in for the convenience of the expert’s checkout lane.

Like, “15 items or less, please. Come on here.” Birth photography creates a visual point of reference where people can challenge what they know, what they think they know about what it means to be a woman or a pregnant person, a birthing person. What it means to be a parent in this world, and turns it all on its fucking head and actually gets them to command better of themselves in the world. I also want to give you more credit here because it’s not even birth photography because we know many professionals who are not invested in challenging the status quo.

We know many birth photographers who are very happy to just be factory setting wedding photographers who show up, take the pictures and go. It’s very much about you and your personality and what you believe and how much you believe in activating change and advocating for activism and how you infuse birth photography with those elements.

When was the catalyst moment for you, where you decided or realized that you could no longer just be the birth photographer who showed up to take pictures and that in fact, you needed to start incorporating higher or more intense levels of the aggressive parts of you, of the impassioned parts of you into this work? What made you come to that realization?

Lacey: This has been a slowly growing weed. [giggles] The very first time I realized that birth was more than just being a fly on the wall and taking pretty pictures was back in 2014. I think I had attended probably my 30th birth or so and I was living in Darwin. I had a client who had an extremely traumatic experience. It was traumatic for me, it was traumatic for her, it was traumatic for the mother, the grandmother, and the husband.

I remember thinking after her baby was ripped from her womb and taken to NICU and the mother was left sitting there going, “What the fuck just happened?” I myself was so shaken by that. I thought this is not making me feel good, like birth is this happy, emotive crying, I’m so overjoyed moment. This was the first time that I experienced that contradiction of what I perceived birth to be.

That is the first time that my eyes were really open to, “Oh, shit. All of this stuff that I thought birth was, we need to reassess.” That was when I first began to understand and that’s how I got into doula work when I experienced a birth that didn’t make me feel good and I knew that there was more to that story. This is where the weed has continued to grow, is that was the first notion that I knew that something was a bit off in birth.
Then, as I began to learn and grow over the years, I think the true catalyst of change for me was after our fifth baby was born. That was such an incredibly transformational moment for me in every capacity, mind, body, spirit, soul, emotions, like anything that you could possibly embody as a human being, for me, was shaken to the fucking core.

After he was born, I experienced this pregnancy that was very, very unexpected. Many of our children were unexpected, but this was a different kind of unexpected. It shook me so much, because people were saying, “Congratulations, I’m so excited for you. Do you have a TV?” “Oh, you know, what causes that?” I know that- this is whenever I was introduced to language and how language affects me and everyone else and people.

I felt something was wrong with me because I was not happy that I was pregnant, but everyone else was happy, so my emotions are broken. It wasn’t until after he was born that I finally began to understand, “Well, no, fuck that. That’s part of the status quo that people are expecting that birthing people are going to be having those feelings, that they’re going to be having.

Therefore it’s assumed congratulations.” That’s whenever I stood up and said, “You know what? I got pregnant. I wasn’t fucking happy about it. I considered aborting a pregnancy. I didn’t abort a pregnancy, but I wanted to, so I thought about killing myself. I thought about doing all of these different things.”

As soon as I released that information and said, “Fuck you and your congratulations, I’m going to tell you what it’s like to be on the other side of that,” that is whenever I just felt completely catapulted and this burning desire deep in my gut to say, “You know what? For all the women who are pregnant and birthing people that are pregnant and aren’t fucking happy for it, happy about it, I see you.”

That’s that conversation that women and people are thinking but don’t have the balls to say and I’ll stand up and say, “No, no, no, what you’re thinking is normal. I thought it too. I’m just going to tell you my story so that way the small minority of people who may- or majority, we don’t know because it’s not talked about, it could be a majority of people that are feeling that way that don’t want to talk about it. Let’s open up that conversation, and everybody who has shitty and terrible things to say about me, go on ahead, say it, pass your judgment because the people who need to hear it are the ones that are going to benefit from it.”

Angela: When we think about vulnerability, when we think about the art of storytelling, when we think about the art of sharing, when we think about what it actually means to challenge the status quo, 99.9% of the time, challenging the status quo simply reads, being myself in a world that asks me to be anything but myself. When it comes to people who might be in the process of conceiving, gestating, birthing, parenting, what are some of the ways that they can actively challenge the status quo?

Lacey: I think by just getting informed and understanding that your needs as an individual are different from mine. What I might consider being a safe birthing place, you might not. Like, for me, I feel birthing at home is safest for me, but somebody else who might have gone off and they might be doing IVF treatments or they might have had a friend or an experience or whatever with a home birth or birth center or whatever it is and might not feel safe birthing there.
We need to start becoming so in tune with our bodies that we know exactly how this is going to play out before it plays out. I’m a massive, and I know you are too, a massive advocate of touching your body, of knowing what it feels like. For me, when I was pregnant, and before I got pregnant, I knew what my cervix felt like before I was pregnant. I knew what it felt like when I was bleeding, when I was ovulating.

I knew what my cervix felt like once I got pregnant, and in the later stages of pregnancy, I knew what it felt like when it was thinning out and as it was dilating. Little things like that helped me know when something was wrong. If something were to go wrong, nothing went wrong. It’s the same thing as checking your breasts. If you’ve got a lump, will you ever know if you’ve got a lump if you don’t touch it?

It’s not just in birth that we’re failing to respect our bodies in a way that we’re intimate with it and we know what it looks like and feels like and where it should be soft and where it shouldn’t be soft. It’s the same thing, I think when you start getting into reproduction and reproductive autonomy. This is where we’re handing the expertise over to someone else. We’re completely missing the mark with our bodies.

Angela: Right now the status quo in terms of everything that is the sphere and arena of contraception, conception, gestating, birthing and mothering, parenting is one box, fit in the box or get the fuck out. We use the same brush to paint every single person. If you are not eagerly handing over your power to be stroked by that one brush, one size fits all, then you are considered to be neglectful, putting yourself in danger, an outcast, a rebel. It’s criminal. It’s illegal.

It’s just ridiculous. There’s so many facets of it. When we say challenging the status quo here, a lot of it really has everything to do with the rebellion that comes with knowing your body first, and then harnessing the wisdom and the love and the reverence for yourself to navigate a system that is relying on you to not do that at all.

It is relying on you to not ask any questions, and it is relying on you to fall in line instead of challenging the conveyor belt that we know of birth. Birth alone is the least one size fits all experience on the planet. It’s like telling people that they have to die between the ages of 75 to 85 and they have to weigh less than 100 kilos to die. When they die, there are only three ways to die and they can only use three funeral houses and then tell them, “We can help you have an empowered individual dying experience.”

It’s funny, though, isn’t it? Because if we used the same logic we do with the status quo of birth and we applied it to death, it’d be absurd, but because there’s no legal litigation risk in dying, and nobody to ask questions or sue you after you die, well, there’s a lot more flexibility. If you were to look at what is the biggest piece of advice you can give somebody to just raise the middle finger up and make decisions from a place that is truly informed and autonomous and excited about everything that they’re moving into in birth and in the postpartum period, what would it be?

Lacey: Acceptance gets you nowhere. Tell me one person who was accepted that made waves. Let’s look at Lady Gaga. Do you know how many people hated her when she first started with her fashion and how fucking crazy she was and outspoken? Yet, look at her now.
I think whenever we start searching for, “I want to be outspoken, but I want to be acceptedly outspoken.” Well, what are we doing? We’re just quieting ourselves to a place where we’re muted. We’re speaking but nobody can hear us.

If you’re wanting to come to a place where you want to make change, and you want to do something about whatever it is that you’re passionate about, you have to be able to block out the noise and the noise is, “Don’t feed your toddlers. They can drink from a fucking cup.” “How dare you breastfeed your child that long?” “How dare you consider birthing at home?” “How dare you hire a midwife?” The list goes on and on and on and on.

I think whenever I began to know myself, and I knew what tickled my pickle, and got me really fucking excited, things like talking about choice gets me really excited, but it’s also really controversial. I need to make sure that I truly understand what choice means because if I jump on the internet, and I start talking about choice, because it’s the buzzword, but I don’t really know a fucking thing about it, then you’re going to get ripped to shreds, and it’s going to deplete you.

I implore anyone who wants to jump into this realm of advocacy to really talk to other people who are on the same brain wavelength as you. Iron sharpens iron, so find somebody who thinks like you, who feels like you because they’re out there. It may not feel like it, but they’re out there. The only way you’re going to find them is if you talk about it.

Angela: The other thing too, is that if you bring it back to Lady Gaga or anybody who has challenged or bended norms, the most fashionable thing that you could do in your life is where your skin like it is haute couture. Imagine if you wear your bump and your breasts and your vision or your chest and everything it is that you want to do in every decision you make, like the finest piece of clothing ever created, even when the whole world laughs at you, everything will change.

Everything changes for you and it’s important that you surround yourself, like you said, with individuals and friends and families and colleagues who see you for the rapturous vision that you are, because that’s going to feed into this positive feedback thing where then you can go ahead and be affirmed and feel strong in the decisions you’re making.

Because if you want to have a home birth with a midwife, and you’re very passionate about gentle parenting, attachment parenting, and you are surrounded with people who have completely different views, it is going to be such a challenge to actually make decisions for yourself, because you’re going to constantly be influenced. If Lady Gaga hung out with a bunch of people who were like, “You’re crazy.” She would have stopped doing whatever she wanted to do a long time ago.

Lacey, then what are you going to take from Lady Gaga and bring to your own business and your own vision? For anybody who does not know this, I run a program called Visibility for Visionaries. The tagline of this is, “Who the fuck are you and why should anyone be paying attention?” Essentially, it is visibility training for people who have big missions and big messages and want to captivate an audience. How are you going to take that, do that, apply the things that you love about Lady Gaga?

Angela: I’m going to ask you, who the fuck are you and why should anyone be paying attention?

Lacey: Like I said, whenever we first started recording, using my images as a platform to educate because birth is so secret that when you put out an image of a woman birthing or crowning, or a partner embracing them, it’s like a shock factor.

I’ve really been able to use my images as a way to say, “Oh, here, look at this pretty picture.” Then people are liking it and commenting, “This is so beautiful.” Then I go, “Oh, read my caption.” My words is where people are really getting hit in the gut. For example, I just posted a picture of me breastfeeding my two toddlers.

That was the wow shock factor to get people to stop. Then my words about choice and abortion, pregnancy, and all of the things is what really got people the thought-provoking. To say, my big garment of clothing is my images.

Angela: What is your goal? What is the evolutionary vision you have for yourself? Where do you want to see yourself and what does challenging the status quo look like there?

Lacey: I see myself traveling around the world, and photographing what birth looks like in different cultures, whether that’s creating a documentary or creating a book, I haven’t thought about it that deeply in detail, but challenging the status quo of what birth looks like in America versus what it looks like in Australia versus what it looks like in Papua New Guinea for indigenous people, for the medicalized and how vastly different birth is, is something that I’m extremely passionate about and it really lights me up.

Angela: What are you going to do to challenge the status quo with that?

Lacey: Well, we’ve got America over here whose cesarean section rates are through the fucking roof. Then you’ve got women in a third world country that their cesarean section rates are fine and maternal rates are fine because they’re birthing with their ancestors because they’re birthing with their mothers, because they have the support, because they have the tribe of women.

Being able to contrast what human and medical intervention have done, versus what happens when you just leave shit alone to do what they’re supposed to do, it’s contrasting the differences between what medicine has done. Look, I’m not saying that medicine is bad. We do need medicine, we do need cesarean sections, but I just find it so intriguing what happens when you leave birth alone.

Angela: Actually, I think that what I want to say here is, I’m surprised that you haven’t brought up that one of the most challenging the status quo conversations that you and I have had that you have that we speak about is unassisted birth. Do you think that you are going to be bringing in the element of the stigma around unassisted birth and undisturbed birth into what it is you want to create with this documentary, with where it is you’re going?

Lacey: It’s really funny because earlier when we were talking about trusting our bodies, I was thinking about when I birthed Max and part of my choice to feel safe was birthing unassisted. By knowing my body, enabled me to birth safely at home unassisted. Now, had I not known my body the way I did, then there’s absolutely no way that I would have been able to make that informed choice and feel safe about it.

The example is, I was anemic. I kept being told I was going to bleed to death, and I couldn’t birth at home. My response was, “Well, yes, I’m at risk of hemorrhaging, but I’m only at risk at hemorrhaging if I actually bleed, to begin with, and if you don’t yank on my placenta, if I don’t have a crazy tear, if you don’t tell me how to push, and you just leave me the fuck alone, then there’s no reason why I should bleed, to begin with.”

Unassisted birthing is really important to me because it gives the expertise back to the woman and I guess in a roundabout way with me saying when you leave birth alone, and you just watch it unfold in its full glory versus giving your expertise to a doctor or someone else. How contradicting the outcomes are? That’s essentially what I’m so keen to go out and document is leaving shit alone versus the medicalized world. What’s the difference? Is it safe? Does it help? Is it a thing? Let’s talk about it.

Angela: I would really encourage anybody who’s listening here today to understand that when it comes to navigating some of the most challenging, confronting moments of your life as someone who is perhaps trying to conceive or gestating or about to give birth, it is just so fucking crucial that you understand that there’s more to this than meets the eye and that you are not going to find your ideal outcome and experience or your most fulfilled experience in a textbook. That is not where biblical transcending epiphanies come from.

You are going to find what is right for you in the chastisement of your soul, in the chasm of your desire, in the chasm of challenging everything it is you think you know about birth and leaving the space to realize that you know fucking nothing and that just like we know nothing about space and nothing about the ocean, we really don’t know anything about the womb, except for its landscape. That’s it. We know that anatomically, that is what it is. We do not understand the complexities, the layers of the whole experience, spirituality, emotional, physical, mental. If you allow yourself this space to know that, whether you’re a birth professional, or you’re a person doing this, or you’re a person listening who’s just simply a birth nerd, it’s impossible to believe that everything we need, as humans, to thrive can be found in life-saving medical procedures, in amenities, in better food, in a private hospital with the best Doctor in the city.

That is not where your evolution and your most fulfilled experience is going to come from. It’s really cool because when you think about how other cultures birth, and how other people birth, and how language comes into that, then we bring in disparities, we bring in minorities, we bring in marginalized communities, we bring in perceptions, and we compare everything to mainstream culture, it’s obvious that we have turned the birth into the McDonald’s experience. That is you go through the drive-thru, you get what it is you need, quick smart, and you get the fuck out.

I’d be very, very excited to see how you shed light on all of this, and how you get people to pay attention, and how we really continue to have the harder conversations because, really, that is what challenging the norm is about. It’s about having the hard conversations to make sure and ensure that people who come afterward and who follow have an opportunity to actually make that decision from a place of total understanding. Lacey, I want to end this by asking, as a birth photographer and as a mother, as a woman, as a serial entrepreneur, as someone who is constantly striving to create bigger and better things, what do you do on a daily basis to challenge the status quo of yourself?

Lacey: I always start by implementing self-awareness. By creating that self-awareness, it enables to replicate or not replicate that. As I continue daily, I thank myself for what I did, or what I accomplished because I find that as an overachiever, high achiever, super freak, [laughs] highly sensitive person, all of the above, then if I am not constantly recognizing what it is that I’m doing, then I get lost in it. I just keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going until it’s been a week and I haven’t rewarded myself for putting up that viral post. I haven’t rewarded myself for getting the kids to bed and have a fucking nap.

When I forget to reward myself is whenever I stop challenging myself. By recognizing that what I have done is good, it helps me continue to persist to do more, or what I view as more good things.
Angela: We live in a culture, essentially, that has divorced our feelings and divorced our relationship to our body. Bringing yourself back to yourself; bringing yourself back home to your emotions on a daily basis is just a really excellent way to be like, “Fuck you world. I am the boss of me, I’m the lover of me, and I’m the believer in me.”

Lacey: Well, gratitude is everything. If I can’t be thankful for the little bit that I have, how the fuck am I going to be thankful and grateful for hitting a million dollars? I have to make sure that I am staying humble small and gratification and showing that I am happy and grateful for the small things that I have. That way, whenever I begin to challenge myself more, then I don’t get out of that habit of being grateful.

Angela: Absolutely. What if people just decided that they would just go with whatever is being dealt to them. What would be the repercussions of that?

Lacey: I think you and I have had a conversation similar to this before, and this is one thing that you said that really got my brain ticking. If we come to a place where we forget how our foremothers birthed, and we’re so disconnected to that, and then we just do whatever it is that doctors tell us to do, are we going to evolve? If you’re coming from a generation of C-sections, which there’s nothing wrong with, are you going to forget how to push in three, four generations time? Are our bodies going to physically adapt and evolve to suit the medical procedures? Our perineum’s going to forget how to stretch because we don’t push anymore. Is this genetically being passed down to our children?

That is a fucking scary thought. The choices that we’re making now with choosing our medical professionals and how we birth, isn’t just affecting us right now, it’s affecting our future generations.

Angela: Believing anything less than that is delusional. This is why when I- and I tried to put this in my book, it’s believing that birth doesn’t matter. That this not even an important conversation, and we’re being selfish. Why not just do the thing we’re being told, and why not be the good girl. It’s like, “Listen to me, mothertruckers. If we keep going the rate we’re going, this is exactly what’s going to happen.” When we refuse to ask questions and command more, we actually are just giving ourselves a one-way ticket to this dystopic reality where humanity’s fucked.

Angela: Lace, where can people find you? How can they work with you? What do you have on offer?

Lacey: If you want to work with me as a doula or a birth photographer, you can find me on the web at I would love to work with any birthing people. If you are a photographer or wanting to get into photography, you can find me at We’ve got a range of different resources. I am currently about to do, for the first time ever, a live launch of exposing birth. Instead of watching the videos, you get to learn live from the source for 12 weeks, 12 modules from me, live, on a call, which is amazing. We’re starting that on the 15th of August, so you can find that at\join. I have a book coming out. Yes.

Angela: Whoo, very exciting stuff. I also just want to clarify that Lacey is based in Melbourne, Victoria in Australia, but she trains people from all around the world. If that is something that you want to do, she trains birth photographers, she mentors them, and she acts as a personal doula and birth photographer.

If you have a body of work, a mission, a message that has been founded on the basis of being the lone wolf and persisting in a state of conviction and passion and self-belief, and ruffling your feathers, and breaking the rules and getting down with your bad self, well, I want to hear from you. Head on over to, or simply look below in the show notes, and there will be a straight up link for you to get me your information. Get the world your inspiration.

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