Rooted in Experience.

A woman with glasses and two children on a beach, one a baby and the other a young girl, all smiling and enjoying time together.

I’m Evony.

In 2022, I stepped away from midwifery after over 20 years to support my daughter through a postpartum mental health crisis. I found my way back to birth as a doula, walking beside women making intuitive choices - freebirths, homebirths after complications, births outside of guidelines. 

Investigations into devastating failings in NHS maternity care have blamed a culture of ‘normal birth’ for creating an unsafe maternity system, yet what was actually being pushed was medicalised birth, not physiological birth.

Today ‘normal’ means artificially breaking the waters, induction of labour using drugs, the use of hormone drips to speed up labour, episiotomy, semi-recumbent birth and the use of forceps and ventouse - all of which have their place in select cases - but also carry a risk in their use.

My mission is to shine a light on physiological birth - undisturbed, optimising hormones, the synchronous dance between the woman or birthing person and their baby.

Catching Babies

My clinical career as a former midwife spans both independent and NHS practice in Wales, Spain, Plymouth and Cornwall, including community midwifery, homebirth, and delivery suite labour and birth care. I have worked extensively with women birthing out-of-guidelines, and I sat on the MBRRACE-UK panel reviewing intrapartum stillbirth in low-risk midwifery-led settings. My career has focused on both community and hospital-based midwifery. After a period as a midwife within the safety and governance team, I moved to being a core midwife on the alongside birth unit during the pandemic. In 2020, I was awarded an Iolanthe Midwifery Trust grant to deliver specialist training in birth physiology and biomechanics to midwives at Royal Cornwall Hospital.

My writing on physiological birth and maternity policy has been published in RCM Midwives, The Practising Midwife, All4Maternity, and the Association of Radical Midwives.

a homebirth midwife, Evony Lynch and client in Spain

I trained with Michel Odent in Spain in 2003 and it was here that I met my first independent homebirth client. She birthed in her bathroom, in the darkness, with her partner present - my first experience of a truly undisturbed birth. You can listen to the story on my podcast.

In 2014, I created MamaCafe - antenatal and postnatal peer support - with a crafty twist! It is no longer running, but the weekly antenatal birth preparation sessions demonstrated the effectiveness of confidence-building, fear reduction and positive birth outcomes, with a high homebirth rate, a natural VBAC of twins in hospital, and positive caesarean births.

This was the forerunner to the Instinctive Birth Method.

I was deeply honoured to receive this recognition of my work, as part of my Iolanthe Award. Mary Cronk was an independent midwife, a fierce advocate for midwifery and a true wise elder of our time. I had the privilege of learning at her feet as a student midwife, and she showed me what it meant to serve birth as a lifelong calling, not a job to retire from.

The Iolanthe Award enabled me to fund training for our midwives in Cornwall to learn biomechanics techniques with Molly O’Brien, and also purchase equipment for the delivery suite, such as peanut balls, mood lighting and projectors, optimising physiology wherever someone was birthing. It’s important that we recognise how we can support physiology for everyone, not just in homebirths and birth centres.

After supporting beautiful births as a midwife for 20 years, I deregistered to enable me to continue to support births in a doula capacity. I have since worked with many women and their partners in Cornwall and to share my experience with the next generation of doulas and midwives.

The Birth Edit

Featured
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Before You Write a Birth Plan, Read This First.

'I’d quite like a water birth. I'd rather not have any drugs. I know, I’ll write a birth plan. You hope. Almost apologetic. As if wanting a physiological birth - a birth where your body works the way it was designed to, where you are mobile and present and meeting your baby on your own terms - is somehow asking too much.

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