Louise Thompson

Post-traumatic stress disorder will sadly plague me for the rest of my life.

At its worst, it looks like traumatic flashbacks, which can be triggered by anything.

You know, it's the smells, it's the sensations, it's the condensation on the window.

that can trigger me into feeling really scared.

I have moments where I feel dissociated and I can not smell or taste or hear or even see that well.

And then I have other moments where I can smell, hear, taste too much so I'm very, very, very sensitive.

Thank you, Fern.

Yes.

So about two months ago, a lady called Theo Clark, who's an ex-conservative MP and me, got together and decided that we wanted to create a petition.

We didn't realize it was going to take two months for it to be approved, but it now is.

And I think that it is fairly crazy that in this country we don't have a maternity commissioner.

So we have a commissioner for the environment, for domestic abuse, for education, for lots of really important topics, but not for maternity.

And there are 600,000 women that give birth on average every year in the UK.

It is the inception of life.

It is the difference between life and death.

It is bringing children into this world who are either going to be born into a stable life

world stable family or not.

And having experienced my own heavily traumatic birth four years ago, I've really seen the challenges that this sort of problem can leave people with.

You know, I've been left with a lot of mental and physical scars and it's taken me a really long time to get to a place where I'm actually functioning like a normal human again.

And I really, you know, Theo has her own experience of birth trauma