Joan Donley


Joan Elsa Donley was a New Zealand midwife whose advocacy of home births and natural childbirth helped shape modern midwifery in her country. She formed the Auckland Home Birth Association, a lobby group for domiciliary midwives, was a founding member of the New Zealand Domiciliary Midwives Society, and is considered the unofficial founder of the New Zealand College of Midwives. Her book is Save the Midwife.
Donley's midwifery career spanned 21 years. She was active politically and argued that women should have the right to reject medicalised maternity care, and helped establish several organisations which promoted natural childbirth and an extension of the rights of midwives. Donley regarded home birth as a ‘feminist and a political act’ by which women could reclaim their bodies from ‘the white, male-controlled obstetrics and gynaecology... specialty which is trying to gain a complete monopoly of childbirth in New Zealand.

Early life in Canada

Carey was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, on 19 March 1916. She was the eldest of the three to bank manager Edward Hunsdon Carey and Gladys Christine Stafford-Carey. She took up nursing because she could not afford to study to be a doctor. She trained at Saskatoon City Hospital, graduating as a registered nurse in 1938 and taking a position with the British Columbia Coast mission at Pender Harbour soon afterwards. Her work there focused on tuberculosis, logging injuries, and childbirth.
Carey married fisherman Robert Fuhland Donley in Vancouver on 22 November 1941. She left nursing to start a family, giving birth to her first child in 1942 and her fifth and last in 1957. The couple initially operated a fishing boat out of Pender Harbour, with Joan becoming one of the first women in the province licensed for hand-lining cod. In the mid-1940s they purchased 19 acres of uncleared land at Middle Point, Pender Harbour where they operated a sawmill and a smokehouse. The couple were active in seeking better roading, electricity, and educational facilities for their district. Life was work, and the marriage difficult, and at 39 Joan had a heart attack. She nursed herself back to health using natural remedies. In 1959 the couple shifted to a ten-acre property at Sechelt. In the early 1960s Joan edited the local newspaper, the Sechelt Peninsula Times, which provided an outlet for her causes and campaigns until she was fired for being too outspoken.

Emigration to New Zealand, early career, and education

In 1964 the family decided to emigrate to New Zealand, motivated in part by fear of nuclear war and the growing influence of the United States in Canadian politics. They settled in Auckland and opened the Crescent Fish Mart in Grey Lynn in 1965. Joan left her husband late in 1969, and used family money from Canada to pay off the couple's debts and purchase a home in Mount Albert.
She decided to become a midwife to support herself and her youngest son, the other children having left home. She undertook the six-month maternity training at National Women's Hospital in 1970 and completed her midwifery training at St Helen's Hospital in 1972, aged 56. She then worked as a midwife for two years at Waitakere Hospital.

Career

In 1974 an older midwife, Vera Ellis Crowther, persuaded her and Carolyn Young to leave the hospital environment and take over from her as domiciliary midwives. Women had been offered the choice of a free hospital birth or a midwife-assisted home birth since the late 1930s, but almost all women chose the hospital option. In 1970 there were just 87 home births in the whole country. The 1971 Nurses Act made it illegal for a midwife to provide maternity care unless a medical practitioner took responsibility for the mother during childbirth. Some doctors continued to support home births attended by midwives, and in 1974 Donley and Young were among the few domiciliary midwives practising in Auckland. Their practice covered an area from Albany to Papatoetoe. Donley's first home birth was that of her granddaughter, Mandy, in 1974.
Donley attended up to 800 births over the course of her 30-year career as a home-birth midwife. She noted in 1986 that calls for assistance ‘come in clusters – frequently around the full or new moon and when it’s dark and stormy. … It’s something to do with electromagnetic forces.’ She used herbal teas, acupuncture, massage, and warm baths to help women give birth without medical intervention, and formed lasting friendships with many of the mothers. It was not a lucrative career, with the Health Department paying only $180 per birth in 1986. But Donley was not in it for the money; for her it was a crusade embedded in her political and philosophical beliefs related to socialism and feminism.
Donley played a central role in setting up a series of organisations to promote the interests of domiciliary midwives. In 1978 she formed the Auckland Home Birth Association, a lobby group for domiciliary midwives. She was a founding member of the New Zealand Domiciliary Midwives Society, established in 1981 and soon accepted as a bargaining body by the Department of Health. At a 1988 meeting of the Midwives and Obstetric Nurses Special Interest Section of the New Zealand Nurses’ Association, she argued that the section should be disbanded in favour of the formation of an independent College of Midwives to ensure the survival of midwifery as a profession. The New Zealand College of Midwives was founded the following year to represent all midwives, set professional standards, and oversee midwife education. A 2010 history of the college credited Donley as its ‘official founder’; without her "amazing insight, conviction and energy’ it would never have come into existence."

Social and political activism

Donley's social activism found various outlets. She was active in the Citizens Association for Racial Equality and the New Zealand Peace Council by the late '60s, and in the early '70s she grew interested in communist China. She served as secretary of the New Zealand China Friendship Society, for which she ran a seminar in Auckland in 1974, and was involved in three tours of China. Her 1975 tour surveyed the women’s liberation movement in the Asian country, which she considered relevant to New Zealand's women’s movement. She noted, "the struggle for socialism is basic. Without that, women’s liberation is merely a dream." She supported the New Zealand Communist Party as the only organisation correctly applying the principles of Chinese communism and encouraged other women to follow her lead.
Donley's political views were directly relevant to her approach to the politics of childbirth. She viewed having a baby at home as a "feminist and a political act" by which "women rebelled against the technological takeover of their bodies" by male doctors and hospital nurses. She rejected the medicalisation of childbirth as "modern medical megalomania", demanding that women be free to choose to deliver their babies naturally and at home. She asked: "Whose body is it? Whose baby is it?"5 Donley encouraged mothers to be aware of the political issues. She was particularly critical of midwives who worked in hospitals, asserting that most of her country's midwives had become a "nurse-midwife, a hybrid, a medically-oriented handmaiden, while the real midwife is an endangered species."
She opposed the government policy of regionalisation of maternity services in the 1970s and 1980s, which involved closing some small maternity hospitals and basing operative, resuscitation, and neonatal technology in regional centres. Donley claimed that this policy was supported by multinational drug companies which made huge profits, and was a self-perpetuating system which guaranteed obstetricians and gynecologists "a monopoly of clinical material" – that is, women. She opposed immunisation for similar reasons, seeing it merely as a "lucrative enterprise promoted by the pharmaceutical empires". She was supportive of the anti-vaccination campaigner Hilary Butler and the Immunisation Awareness Society she founded in 1988.
She lobbied for professional recognition of midwives by the government and for direct entry into midwifery training. The 1990 Nurses Amendment Act gave midwives pay parity with doctors for attendance at childbirth and the right to practice independently. Tertiary institutions soon offered direct-entry midwifery courses. Donley had influenced this legislation by writing regularly to Health Minister Helen Clark, her local member of parliament.
The 1980s was a decade of intense political campaigning for Donley. She published many articles and several books, notably Save the Midwife, a polemical history of New Zealand midwifery. She networked with radical and home-birth midwives in the country as well as in Australia, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. In 1984 she traveled to the U.S. and Canada; the next year she attended a National Homebirth Australia Conference in New South Wales. She corresponded with the International Confederation of Midwives, and with the UK-based Association of Radical Midwives. In 1990 she attended an Invitational Forum on Midwifery Education and Practice, in Toronto.
From the late 1980s Donley was active on the Auckland Women's Health Council. She kept a watching brief over developments in midwifery education and practice into the '90s, attending meetings, speaking at conferences and writing reports. She accumulated an extensive archive of offprints, reports, and newspaper clippings. She continued to show an interest in all aspects of feminine and children's health, with a particular interest in alternative medicine. She visited China again in 1992 to study the applicability of acupuncture and homeopathy to childbirth.

Later life

Donley's contributions to the politics of childbirth were publicly recognized in various ways. In the 1990 New Year Honours, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to midwifery, and was awarded both the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal and the New Zealand Suffrage Centennial Medal 1993. In 1997, she was awarded an honorary master's degree in midwifery from the Auckland Institute of Technology, and in 2001 the New Zealand College of Midwives established the Joan Donley Midwifery Research Collaboration as its research arm.
She retired from midwifery in 1995 after she was injured in a car accident. In 1998 the College of Midwives reprinted Save the Midwife as Birthrites: Natural vs Unnatural Childbirth in New Zealand. Donley declared in a new introduction, "After 50 years of being “under the doctor” it is difficult for women to overcome their fear-based medical dependence and opt to regain control of their bodies and their births." She maintained her feminist principles to the end and died in Auckland following a stroke on 4 December 2005 at the age of 89. She is survived by her children, 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.