Brenda Harkin is a Nurse, Midwife, Hypnotherapist, and internationally experienced expert in physiological birth and women’s reproductive health. Based in Wexford, she has been providing homebirth services across Ireland’s South East since 2019 and is an active member of the Irish Birth Movement, advocating for improved maternity services and greater choice for women.

With over 30 years’ experience across three continents, Brenda has witnessed both the strengths and limitations of maternity care systems worldwide. Her mission is clear: to change the way we give birth in Ireland by removing fear, normalising homebirth, and moving away from a one-size-fits-all medical model that can disempower women.

She champions midwife-led, evidence-based care where women are seen, heard, and supported to birth with confidence and trust.
Brenda trained in the Mongan Method of Hypnobirthing in 2014, an experience she describes as the single most transformative step in her professional development after qualifying as a midwife. Hypnobirthing deepened her understanding of birth as a physiological process and reshaped her practice. It gave her a profound tool to help women connect with their innate ability to give birth, trust their bodies, and release fear.
Building on this foundation, Brenda has since developed her own hypnobirthing program. It integrates positive psychology, somatics, mindfulness, and yoga, offering mothers a holistic, evidence-based approach that empowers them to prepare not only their minds, but their whole being, for birth.
Alongside her hypnotherapy and midwifery work, Brenda also teaches baby massage, somatic movement, and has a special interest in birth trauma recovery and pelvic floor health.
Across every setting, she has seen the same truth: fear is the greatest enemy of birth, and when women are supported to replace fear with confidence and trust, birth can become profoundly positive, empowering and transformational.