The Australian Senate established the Select Committee on Women’s Health

On 19 August 2026, the Australian Senate established the Select Committee on Women’s Health. The committee is chaired by South Australian Senator Marielle Smith, with Queensland Senator Larissa Waters as Deputy Chair, alongside senators from across the political spectrum.

Although its remit extends across women’s health, postpartum healthcare sits right at the beginning of its terms of reference. The committee is examining best-practice approaches to postpartum healthcare; women’s physical, psychological, emotional and economic experiences following birth; pregnancy and postpartum models of care; infant feeding support; perinatal mental health; pelvic health physiotherapy and other allied health services; longer-term maternal health; birth injuries; women’s pain and experiences of medical misogyny. It also encompasses the experiences of partners and families, including those who have experienced infant loss.

Senator Marielle Smith has spoken openly about why postpartum care matters personally to her. Following the birth of her first child, she experienced significant breastfeeding difficulties, pain and postnatal anxiety. Although she was eventually able to access a lactation consultant, she has reflected publicly that good postpartum healthcare should not depend on a woman’s income, luck or postcode.

In a recent conversation with Sophie Walker of Australian Birth Stories, Senator Smith also spoke about something many mothers know intuitively: the so-called six-week postpartum check can feel like the end of maternal care, even while feeding difficulties, pelvic health concerns, birth injuries, pain, anxiety, depression and the enormous psychological adjustment of becoming a mother may continue for many months.

At Ma Wisdom, this is one of the reasons we care so deeply about this inquiry. Postpartum is not an appointment at six weeks. It is a season of physical recovery, emotional adjustment, identity change, relationship change and enormous practical demand. In many traditional cultures around the world, the weeks after birth have long been recognised as a time when the mother herself requires care, nourishment, rest and protection. Modern health systems have not always managed to hold that same understanding alongside the extraordinary advances we have made in medicine.

This isn't just a “new mothers” inquiry

It would be easy to assume Australia’s Senate inquiry into postpartum care belongs primarily to the women currently in the thick of it: the ones with a newborn on their chest and a body still healing.

Their voices are deeply important. But they are not the only voices that matter.

The committee's invitation is not restricted to women who have recently given birth. A woman who became a mother in the 1950s can contribute her experience if it speaks to the issues being examined, just as a mother who gave birth this year can. Birth Trauma Australia, which has created resources to help people participate in the inquiry, makes the point that this is not simply an inquiry for people who experienced birth trauma either. It is an opportunity for women to share a wide spectrum of experiences of healthcare, birth and postpartum life.

Australian Birth Stories has made a similar invitation, encouraging women to contribute whether their experience was positive or difficult. That distinction matters enormously. We do not only learn by documenting what went wrong. We can also learn by remembering what went right.

Perhaps you remember being kept in hospital long enough to feel genuinely recovered before you went home. Perhaps a midwife visited regularly. Perhaps a maternal and child health nurse knew your family well enough to notice when something changed. Perhaps your mother, sister, aunties or neighbours simply understood that a newly postpartum woman should be fed, rested and cared for, and gathered around you without needing to be asked.

Maybe you felt safe. Maybe you felt listened to. Maybe somebody made you feel capable at a time when everything was new.

If those experiences are now difficult to access, expensive, inconsistent or simply no longer considered part of ordinary postpartum life, that matters too.

Progress is rarely a straight line. We can improve clinical safety, knowledge and technology while losing continuity, time, community or forms of relational care along the way.

Understanding what Australian postpartum care should become therefore requires more than identifying its failures. It also requires asking what has worked, what has disappeared, and what mothers once received that may be worth bringing forward.

You may have lived this story twice

Postpartum care does not happen in isolation. It happens inside families and communities, often held together by exactly the kind of people Ma Wisdom was created for.

It is the grandmother who drives over with a lasagne because she remembers how deeply it mattered when somebody did that for her. It is also the grandmother who brings food precisely because she remembers nobody bringing any when she needed it most.

It is the grandfather who notices his daughter has withdrawn and remembers something of what his partner experienced after their own children were born. It is the chosen family member who stays, cooks, holds the baby, washes the dishes or simply sits beside a new mother because they understand that sometimes care is not about fixing anything. It is about ensuring someone does not have to move through a vulnerable season alone.

This gives grandparents and older mothers an unusual vantage point. You may be able to understand postpartum care across generations, not only because you have watched it happen, but because you remember what it felt like when you were the one inside it.

You know what happened when you were recovering. You know something of what it did to you. And now you may be watching another generation move through the fourth trimester.

You can see what has improved and what has disappeared. What became more evidence-informed. What became easier to talk about. What became more expensive. What became harder to access. What used to happen in the home and now requires an appointment. What modern mothers have that you wish you had. And what you had that you wish they still did.

Sometimes you may even find yourself thinking, we actually did this part better then.

That does not require us to romanticise the past. There were profound gaps in maternity care, consent, mental health recognition, pain management and women's autonomy in previous generations.

But perhaps there was more time. More home-based care. More intergenerational support. A longer period of convalescence. A stronger cultural expectation that a woman who had just grown and birthed a human being should herself be looked after.

If you experienced something positive that mothers around you no longer seem to receive, that is not merely nostalgia.

It can be a clue about what good care looks like.

What lived experience can tell us

This inquiry is occurring within a much larger national conversation about whether women are sufficiently heard within healthcare.

Victoria’s landmark Inquiry into Women’s Pain, led through the Victorian Department of Health, Safer Care Victoria and the Inquiry into Women’s Pain Subcommittee, heard from more than 13,000 women, girls, carers, clinicians, researchers and others. Its final report, Bridging the Gender Pain Gap, identified widespread experiences of women having their pain dismissed or inadequately treated and made 27 recommendations spanning healthcare models, research, workforce, professional development, affordability and accessibility.

The current Senate inquiry creates another opportunity for lived experience to sit alongside clinical evidence.

The Australian College of Midwives (ACM) has welcomed the inquiry and is calling for universal and equitable access to midwifery continuity of care, comprehensive needs-based postnatal care, better mental and pelvic health support, culturally responsive maternity care, stronger informed consent and greater access to First Nations-led Birthing on Country models.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has separately argued that the first 12 months postpartum should become a defined national preventive-health and Medicare reform priority.

COPE – the Centre of Perinatal Excellence, led by founder and Executive Director Dr Nicole Highet, continues to highlight how fragmented and inconsistent support during early parenthood can increase distress, undermine confidence and make it harder for parents to know when or where to seek help.

Birth Trauma Australia, Australia's peak charity focused on birth-related trauma, has been advocating strongly around the long-term physical, psychological, relational and economic consequences of birth injuries and trauma, while encouraging people to contribute their experiences to this inquiry.

These organisations bring research, clinical experience, advocacy and thousands of individual stories to the table.

But they cannot replace your story.

Think about what you carry that cannot be found in a spreadsheet.

Perhaps there was a home-visiting midwife who sat at your kitchen table and actually had time to notice how you were. Maybe your own mother moved in for six weeks. Maybe neighbours brought food without being asked. Perhaps there was a cultural or family understanding that the woman who had given birth was not expected to immediately return to normal life.

Or maybe there was nothing at all.

Perhaps you were exhausted and did not know whether what you were feeling was normal. Perhaps you were frightened by your own thoughts and did not know who to tell. Perhaps you felt strong and beautifully supported. Perhaps you were overwhelmed by love and responsibility at the same time. Perhaps you were in pain everyone around you expected you to tolerate.

These are different stories, but they can all teach us something.

What we lost matters as much as what we gained

There can be a tendency, particularly among older generations, to say, “That was a long time ago,” or, “Things were different then,” and assume that an experience from decades ago is no longer relevant.

But that difference may be precisely what makes it useful.

If something helped you feel deeply supported fifty years ago and has since disappeared, that is worth examining. If a model of care allowed you to rest, recover or feel known and it is now uncommon or only available to families who can afford it privately, that tells us something.

Likewise, if you felt dismissed, frightened, unseen or left to cope alone fifty years ago and mothers are still describing versions of those experiences today, that tells us something too.

A memory from 1972 does not tell us exactly what postpartum healthcare looks like in Australia in 2026. It does not need to. It tells us something about what it was like to inhabit that system at that moment in history.

Put generations of stories side by side and richer questions become possible. What changed? What improved? What was lost? What should never be repeated? What did we once understand about caring for new mothers that might be worth remembering?

What a Senate submission actually is

A submission does not need to be a formal academic paper written in the language of government. You are not being asked to solve postpartum healthcare in Australia. You are being invited to contribute what you know because you lived some part of it.

You might describe what postpartum support looked like when you had your own children, including the things that worked well as much as what was missing. You could talk about physical recovery after birth, breastfeeding or infant feeding support, postnatal depression or anxiety, pelvic health, birth injury, relationships, paid and unpaid work, financial pressures, family support, community care, continuity with health professionals, or simply what it felt like to become a mother in your particular time and place.

Perhaps there was something available to you decades ago that you wish today's mothers still had. Maybe a professional came routinely to your home. Maybe you stayed in hospital long enough to genuinely recover. Maybe the people around you expected to cook, clean and care for you. Maybe a GP, midwife or maternal and child health nurse knew you well enough to recognise when something wasn't right.

Or perhaps today's mothers have access to language, treatment and support you desperately wish had existed for you.

Sometimes both things will be true at once: medicine has advanced, our knowledge has expanded and conversations about perinatal mental health, birth trauma, consent and pelvic health have changed enormously, while some of the ordinary human infrastructure around mothering has become thinner.

That complexity belongs in the conversation too.

Two useful questions to sit with are: What did you receive after birth that you would want every mother to have access to today? And what did you need that never came?

Either answer could be the beginning of a meaningful submission.

If the new mother in your life cannot write hers

There is another reason grandparents and chosen family have a place in this conversation.

Many new parents are exhausted, stretched thin and simply do not have the bandwidth to sit down and prepare a submission, even though their experiences are among the most current examples of how Australia's postpartum healthcare system is functioning.

You might be the person with the time and steadiness to help.

Not to speak for them, but to sit beside them. Ask what their postpartum experience has actually been like. Listen not only for what happened but for how it felt.

What made you feel cared for? What made you feel alone? When did you feel most vulnerable? Which professional or service made the biggest difference? What did you need that nobody seemed to notice?

And perhaps there is another question worth asking each other: Was there anything I had after birth that you wish you had now?

This is where generations can offer something especially useful to the Senate Select Committee on Women’s Health. Not a competition over who had it harder or whose way was better, but an honest comparison of what each generation was given, what each was denied, and what we might choose to carry forward.

Why Ma Wisdom cares

Every course, every conversation and every piece of content we build at Ma Wisdom rests on a simple belief: grandparents and chosen family are not peripheral to the postpartum period. They are part of its supportive ecosystem.

Formal postpartum healthcare matters enormously. We need skilled midwives, GPs, maternal and child health nurses, lactation professionals, pelvic health physiotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and other health professionals who understand the postpartum period.

But wraparound care is larger than healthcare.

This inquiry gives Australia an opportunity to think more expansively about what it means to care for women after birth.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler has said that Senate inquiries can play an important role in building the evidence and case for reform, pointing to previous inquiries into reproductive health and menopause and perimenopause that informed subsequent women's health policy. He has also specifically acknowledged the advocacy of Birth Trauma Australia in bringing greater attention to postpartum care and birth injury.

A woman who became a mother in 1956 has something to contribute to this conversation. So does the woman who became one last Tuesday.

Perhaps one of the most powerful things the Australian Senate Select Committee on Women’s Health can do is allow those experiences to sit alongside one another so that Australia is not only asking how to fix what is broken in postpartum care, but what has worked, what has been lost, what needs protecting, and what kind of maternal care we want to offer the generations still to come.

Submissions to the Select Committee on Women’s Health currently close 9 October 2026, with its final report due on 18 August 2027. Check the Parliament of Australia website at aph.gov.au for the latest information before submitting.

You do not need to be a doctor, midwife, researcher or policy expert to contribute.

You can make your submission here: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Womens_Health/WomensHealth