In May 2024, the NSW Parliament’s Select Committee on Birth Trauma handed down a landmark report — Australia’s first parliamentary inquiry dedicated to the issue, containing five findings and 43 recommendations aimed at addressing preventable birth trauma. The inquiry was catalysed, in part, by research finding that 28% of women in NSW had experienced birth trauma, with more than one in ten reporting some form of obstetric violence.
The report confirmed what many women already knew from lived experience: that failures around continuity of care, informed consent, and the use of interventions including forceps, vacuum, and caesarean section are recurring and preventable. These are systemic failures — and the inquiry’s recommendations are directed at fixing the system.
But system reform and individual legal rights are two different things. Recommendations to government do not resolve the harm already done to individual women. A duty of care exists independently of any inquiry, and for women whose injuries were caused by medical negligence, the pathway to accountability is a personal legal claim — not a policy change.
In this episode of the Birth Injury Lawyers Podcast, award-winning lawyer Anthony Porthouse walks through the inquiry’s key findings and explains the critical distinction between systemic reform and individual rights — including why not every experience of birth trauma gives rise to a legal claim, and what steps are worth considering next.
