Denise Love is a dynamic international speaker and educator.
She is passionate about life and compelled to support women through their many transitions in life. With an ever developing interest in life and death, she walks the path with many around death, particularly women whose babies die, either in utero, at birth, or soon thereafter.
With a Masters degree in nursing, living and working in remote villages in Asian countries as well as Australia, she is determined that women and babies be treated respectfully within their cultural expectations.
As a childbirth educator and an instigator of the introduction and training of doulas in Australia 20 years ago, Denise identified the vital need for birthing women to ""find their voice"" and trust their ancient internal ability to birth their babies. This recognition was stimulated by the developed world's highly structured interventionist and medicalised birthing paradigms and seemingly inflexible protocols and practices. Birth matters and so does the way we all die. Combining direct language, ritual and acknowledgement of grief when a baby dies, Denise brings a refreshing attitude and approach.
In her early years, practising as a Registered Nurse in remote indigenous communities, Denise gained valuable insight into how to trust our innate ability to birth, live fully and die. Denise's view has since been further reinforced through her work with vulnerable marginalised villagers in developing countries, where death is accepted as just a normal part of living.
Death is an extraordinary “thing” in our society. Since the invention of modern medicine, death has become the enemy, the unexcepted, the unacceptable, something to fight against, and a failure. Notwithstanding the fact that death is the only known certainty in life, we are shocked and overly distressed about it. There seems to be a hierarchy in death, that children shouldn’t die. It isn’t too many years ago that a mother expected with her large family that she would “lose” 2-3 children. That is still my experience in developing countries. I bring with me balance of modern medicine working together with educated mothers, and traditional expectations and practices, to try and find that balance in our work.
I will be discussing a baby as meaning from the moment of conception through to first year of life. We will explore the concept that as health professionals how our own thoughts, feelings, fears and beliefs influence how we respond to a mother and her family. The behaviours and expectations of the people around her influence her grief path, therefore we need to be clear and conscious in our communication. Examine rituals and behaviours that can alleviate some of her devastation, relief or pain.
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