We celebrate pregnancy and birth, then quietly disappear at the moment mothers need us most. Perinatal GP Dr Kavita Jade on why postpartum care is an unfinished feminist fight.
Every day I sit across from a woman who is breaking.
Quietly breaking. The kind of break that carries questions she cannot quite say out loud.
Am I going to be able to do this? Am I still me? What have I gotten myself into?
She did not expect it to be like this. Nobody told her about the relentlessness of the feeding, the nappies, the holding, the constant physical and emotional demand of keeping a small human alive while simultaneously trying to work out who she now is.
Nobody told her about the flood of contradictory advice coming from every direction; family, friends, social media and strangers all delivered with confidence, much of it conflicting and inadequate.
Nobody warned her about the loneliness that can exist in the middle of a room full of people who love her.
I ask how she is doing. The tears fall uncontrollably. Then the same lines I hear every day
“I can’t do this. I’m failing.”
She didn’t fail. We failed her. We failed as a society which celebrates pregnancy and birth, then quietly disappears at precisely the moment mothers need support most.
I am a GP with a special interest in breastfeeding and lactation medicine. I am also an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC).
In the first six months of 2026 alone, I have sat across from more than 800 women with tears streaming down their faces, breaking. I am just one doctor. Every GP, every midwife, every lactation consultant, every child and family health nurse working with new parents sees the same thing.
We are watching the same crisis repeat itself and calling it normal. It isn’t. This is a national one playing out almost 300,000 times every year for every baby born in Australia.
This is a feminist issue. So why aren’t we treating it like one?
Somewhere in the fight for equality, motherhood became strangely absent from the conversation. No longer spoken about – as if motherhood diminished women.
We fought to establish that women are more than their reproductive bodies. That women deserve education, careers, financial independence and the freedom to define their own lives. That fight remains unfinished and essential. But somehow the plight of mothers is not deemed worthy of priority.
Is the silence one of the enduring legacies of the patriarchal system? After all, patriarchy is not just about who holds power. Patriarchy dictates what we prioritise, what we value. Care work has been undervalued and underappreciated precisely because it was largely performed by women. Raising children. Feeding babies. Caring for families. The work that sustains the next generation has been framed as private rather than essential.
Devaluing motherhood diminishes us all.
A baby’s needs and a mother’s needs cannot be separated
We have made this more complicated than it is. A newborn needs to be fed – consistently, responsively and around the clock. We send mothers home from hospital within days with very minimal information.
We return partners to work within weeks. We live increasingly isolated from the communities that once surrounded new families. We measure success by how quickly a mother returns to “normal”.
But what if the problem is our definition of normal?
What if the postpartum period requires protection rather than pressure? Time to recover. Time to establish feeding. Time to learn each other. Time to be supported. Instead, mothers drown in the overload and then we ask why they struggled to swim.
The cost of ignoring mothers is real. The consequences are not just emotional; they are clinical, social and economic. When 96 per cent of Australian mothers initiate breastfeeding and 84 per cent stop before they want to, that is not a choice; it’s a failure of support. Real choice requires real support. Without it, what we call choice is simply what happens when nobody comes.
Supporting breastfeeding improves health outcomes for mothers and babies. Investment in breastfeeding support reduces preventable illness, hospitalisations and healthcare costs.
We know support works.
Yet we continue to underinvest, and the burden does not fall equally. First Nations mothers experience significant inequities in breastfeeding outcomes. Mothers who can afford private lactation support can access expertise, while mothers who cannot often go without.
What actually needs to happen
I am not here to describe a problem without a solution.
As Chair of the RACGP Breastfeeding and Lactation Medicine SIG, I have spent the past year working with colleagues on a reform agenda.
We need the postpartum year recognised as a national preventive health priority. We need a Medicare Postpartum Care Plan so structured support after birth is a right, not a privilege for those who can pay. We need clinical expertise at the centre of policy. And we need to start measuring what is happening to mothers and babies in this country.
Because you cannot fix what you refuse to measure.
Every day I see what happens when we do not centre this.
I see women who have internalised a system failure as a personal one. I see exhaustion called normal. I see feeding journeys ending not because they had to, but because nobody came. No mother should leave those first twelve weeks feeling like she failed. The evidence exists. What is missing is the will to act.
Motherhood and babies have been sidelined long enough. Stop looking away.