Louise Thompson

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

weirdly, we both went to the same prep school and secondary school and reconnected in 2024 when my book came out.

Yeah, and she's quite a bit older than me, if I say that.

I don't want to be an insult.

She's in her 40s.

I'm 35.

So we weren't close, but we have that weird thing in common and it felt like something that was meant to happen, you know, that this was the serendipitous moment that we...

We were meant to connect, even though it was in awful circumstances.

And so we started working together.

And she obviously has the parliamentary background.