What happens when the knowledge that once held birth within a community is lost? And what do we lose when the women who carried that knowledge are forced to leave their way of life behind? What can we learn of belonging from a culture of movement? In this episode, we are joined by Clare Cox, a Romany Gypsy doula, Gypsy and Traveller birthrights activist and published researcher with 26 years of experience supporting families through birth, postpartum recovery and pregnancy loss. I came to know Clare through her participation in our year-long programme, Deepen Your Roots, where she brought a distinctive perspective on belonging, shaped by a cultural heritage of movement, resilience and community. Growing up, Clare witnessed birth as a community event, held by women who knew one another and passed their knowledge between generations. Today, much of that knowledge and the communal fabric that sustained it has been disrupted by discrimination, forced settlement and the medicalisation of birth. Clare speaks about the grief of cultural erasure, the pressure to conceal her identity and the romanticisation of “gypsy” culture by those who have never lived its realities. We explore birth as a site of ancestral knowledge and bodily sovereignty, considering how women can be supported to make informed choices that feel right for them, whether they birth at home or in hospital. Clare shares the importance of community-based care, traditional herbal knowledge and the warmth and nourishment that support postpartum recovery. We also turn towards pregnancy loss, an experience that remains profoundly overlooked in our healthcare systems and wider culture. Drawing on her own experience of three pregnancy losses, Clare invites us to reconsider the language we use, the care that is missing and the importance of recognising early pregnancy loss as a birth that happened too soon. We speak about ritual, remembrance and the need to tend the body and honour the baby after loss. Throughout our conversation, we return to the red thread of lineage: the everyday traditions, foods, songs, stories and skills through which ancestral knowledge lives on. Clare reminds us that cultural continuity is often woven through ordinary acts of care, and that supporting mothers is work with consequences for generations to come. In this conversation, we explore: * Romany Gypsy birth traditions and the women who held birth within community * Cultural erasure, forced settlement and the grief of losing an ancestral way of life * The romanticisation and appropriation of Gypsy identity and traditional practices * Belonging, migration and the relationship between community and place * Birth sovereignty, instinct and making informed choices around home birth and hospital birth * The importance of doulas, birthkeeping and intergenerational women’s knowledge * Traditional herbal wisdom, the birthkeeper’s garden and forming relationships with the plants around us * Pregnancy loss, the language of “miscarriage” and the need for more compassionate aftercare * Ritual, ceremony and closing the bones as ways of tending the body and marking transitions * Postpartum nourishment, warming foods and the importance of rest * Motherhood, the undervaluing of care work and the everyday practices that keep lineage alive Find Clare’s work Clare is based in Worcestershire, UK, where she offers doula support to families locally. She also provides virtual birth support for families worldwide. Through her work, Clare offers: * Bringing Birth Home: a course for parents preparing for home birth. * The Birthkeeper’s Garden: a self-paced online programme exploring how to grow, identify, harvest and use herbs in birth work. * Naturopathic postpartum doula mentorship: supporting those who wish to develop their knowledge of traditional postpartum care. * One-to-one birth support: available virtually for families around the world. clarecoxdoula.com Further resources Clare has generously shared a booklet, Herbs for a Healing Home Birth, with our podcast patrons and paid Substack subscribers. Find it through our Patreon community and Rooted Healing on Substack. Discover our courses, gatherings and further explorations of embodied deep ecology at rootedhealing.org. You can also support the Rooted Healing Podcast through our Patreon community and sign up to our monthly Substack newsletter to receive two free workshops in our approach to embodied deep ecology. The music in this episode is from Telling the Bees. The Rooted Healing podcast is hosted by Veronica Stanwell. Thank you for listening. The Rooted Healing Podcast explores how we heal and reweave our inner and outer landscapes, remembering how to belong to this animate world through body, place, ancestry, ceremony and community. Get full access to Rooted Healing at rootedhealing.substack.com/subscribe
