Whole books have been written about the role of a birth partner and I had read none of them when I became my daughter’s labour sidekick a couple of years ago. Nothing could have prepared me for the reality anyway.

I gave birth to her and her sister in the 1980s, an era when epidural analgesia was still highly restricted and considered a kind of moral cowardice, replete with warnings of physical catastrophe.

Like many women in that grim decade, I kept up the health insurance payments specifically for the private en suite and the chance of an epidural through the kind offices of a He-God private obstetrician. In the labour ward I bayed so loudly for that epidural that my prestigious obstetrician ordered me (loudly) to stop shouting because I was disturbing the other mothers. The fact that I was spared the worst of the birth agonies because health insurance had opened access to an epidural – almost alone of the suffering women in that ward – was a further shame.

Despite that my husband and I carried on paying for insurance because stories coming from the public system about waiting times worried even the most sanguine. Then in our late 50s and in ghastly succession, we each got cancer.

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