A lack of support in maternity wards and information provided to women about medical birthing processes and interventions before and during labour, which results in the giving of uninformed consent, are some of the reasons provided by two North-West mothers who chose homebirth for their second-born children.

Research shows that these negative birth experiences can contribute to the development of post-natal depression and result in post-traumatic-stress-disorder.

According to the Australasian Birth Trauma Association about 9000 women develop PTSD after giving birth each year, but many go undiagnosed.

Countless others experience some form of birth trauma, which can relate to physical injury but also the lingering emotional and psychological impacts of a less-than-satisfactory birthing experience.

For Bethany Ayton, 26, of Devonport, there were a range of issues within the hospital setting that resulted in her birth trauma, and which led her to seek a different option for the birth of her second child.

For one, she wanted to have an as natural birth as possible but felt unsupported by the hospital to fulfil these wishes.

Secondly, she said there was little birthing guidance from midwives during labour, where she experienced a lack of help from hospital midwives to find alternative birthing positions to move and deliver her difficulty positioned baby.

She believes this lack of assistance on the maternity ward contributed to the eventual vacuum-delivery of her son.

"The real lack of support is what got me. I felt so vulnerable but it just didn't seem to matter to any of them. I was a number and they just wanted to get my baby out," Mrs Ayton said.

"I was told they would need to assist delivery but I did not necessarily know what this meant. All of these things just happen to you without you knowing, and you feel violated because you have no idea that they are doing these things to your body."

After the birth, Mrs Ayton said she felt disappointed and confused, and has attended counselling to assist with these thoughts.

"I felt like I didn't deliver my baby. He was pulled out of me, and that was quite traumatic. Even now it is still raw for me, five and a half years later," she said.

"I thought that I had let my son down and I felt like I failed myself. I felt that I had done something wrong but I didn't know what that was. I also felt like the hospital had failed me."

Looking back on her experience she questions why medicalised births and interventions become the norm for all women, including those who are young, and who experience a normal and healthy pregnancy.

"When I was labouring at home I was comfortable, I was at ease, my contractions were lovely and regular, but as soon as I walked into that hospital setting it wasn't calming and it wasn't relaxing, it was clinical and it was medical," she said.

"Rather than medicalising every single birth that walks through the hospital door, including low risk, healthy and young women, whose babies are healthy, birthing should only become medicalised when it is necessary."

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During her second labour for the birth of her daughter, a homebirth, she said her private midwives coaxed her through the labour, suggesting various positions to assist delivery of the baby who was also in a difficult position.

"After the birth of my daughter at home I felt empowered, I was on a complete high, climbing out of the birth pool, laughing, but at my son's birth the midwives just wanted to get my baby out, none of them truly cared about the person I was, or how I was feeling. You are just someone who is birthing a baby," she said.

The experiences of Mrs Ayton are familiar to Tasmanian doula Genevieve Sayers who has long-lobbied for maternity reform.

"Women choose homebirth because they get continuity of care from a known midwife, it does not involve going to the hospital and instead is in their home in their normal, safe and familiar environment, they can have who they want at the birth, and they have more control over what happens," she said.

"They look for something different because they weren't happy with their first experience, whether it was trauma, an intervention of some kind, or they just weren't happy with the care for some reason."

Mrs Sayers said general practitioners generally inform expectant mothers of just two options for giving birth; either in the public or private hospital system, and this is a major problem.

"Referrals depend on whether women have private health or not. That is not the best way to direct women into maternity care," she said.

"It should be 'do you want a normal birth?' Here are some options with low interventions, rather than just directing them immediately into the hospital system.

"Women don't realise there are options out there, and they don't get that information unless they really go looking for it."

Mrs Ayton has two beautiful and healthy children and delivered babies in the hospital and at home. The experiences, she said, were vastly different. Homebirth, for her, was the best choice.

She added that she does not want to scare new mothers, and realises that homebirth is not for everyone.

After the births, she joined a local Australian Breastfeeding Association group, and naturally, the women shared their birthing stories.

The experience, she said, was healing.

"It was quite helpful. We were all able to share our personal experiences and I discovered that a lot of the mums had stories similar to mine," she said.

"It made me realise, why on earth is the system the way it is? If there are so many of us sitting here comparing stories which are so similar, there is something wrong."