Written by

Michelle Gatt

Clinical Nurse Specialist in Continence. Michelle works with women navigating bladder leakage, pelvic floor recovery and everything in between. She brings clinical knowledge and zero judgment to every conversation.

Let's set the scene. You sneeze. Not even a big one - a polite, indoor, one-hand-cupped-over-your-mouth kind of a sneeze. And yet, somewhere below deck, there's a small but unmistakable oh oh. Or maybe you laugh at a friend's joke and automatically reflex and cross your legs. You see a trampoline at a kid's birthday party and your first thought isn't oh my God it's so fun. It's absolutely not. Any of that sounds familiar? Congratulations - you have a pelvic floor, and it's clearly seen some things.

Nobody puts the pelvic floor on a vision board. It doesn't get a training montage. There's no activewear range named after it - well, yet. But this quiet, unglamorous sling of muscle sitting somewhere between your hip bones is doing more unpaid overtime than anybody in your household. Think of it as a hammock slung between your pelvic bone and your tailbone - front to back - holding up your bladder, your bowels and your uterus. It's also kind of acting as a bouncer at the door for number ones, and once upon a time, an actual human. It's basically the unpaid intern of your anatomy. It does all the important work and gets none of the credit. Nobody trained it properly before throwing it in the deep end.

Pregnancy and birth asked an extraordinary amount of your hammock - whether you delivered vaginally, by caesarean section, or as we like to say, out the sunroof. Nine months of extra weight, hormonal softening of your connective tissue, and the main event itself can leave your hammock feeling more like a stretched-out old singlet. It doesn't mean it's broken. It just means it's been through a genuine athletic event and nobody gave it a medal or a trophy to take home.

Here's where we get a little bit serious for a moment - because the stats are honestly more validating than any group chat full of oh my God, same, me too.

The most significant figure: 1 in 3 women who have ever had a baby will experience incontinence at some point.

Zooming out to international research from 2023 to 2025, pooled data suggests around 33% of women experience some form of urinary incontinence in the first three months postpartum - roughly 12% leaking weekly and 3% daily. Vaginal births roughly double the odds compared with caesarean (about 31% versus 15%). Broader pelvic floor dysfunction - incontinence, prolapse and pelvic pain together - affects somewhere in 1 in 4 and 1 in 2 women, depending on the age and how many babies they've had.

Translation: if you're still leaking a little bit when you cough, laugh or attempt a star jump, you are not broken, you are not alone, and you are absolutely not the only mum eyeing off the quiet corner at every kid's party in case of an emergency.

Despite this being spectacularly common, bladder leaks after baby have historically just been filed under "a part of motherhood" - passed down like a Tupperware set that nobody really wanted. Sometimes mentioned in hushed tones by your own mum, maybe even joked about at a baby shower, but rarely actually treated. The good news is that this is actually shifting. Incontinence is now formally recognised as a national women's health priority in Australia - with better access to pelvic floor physiotherapy specifically called out as one of their goals. Translation: it's no longer something they are supposed to just quietly manage with those lovely beige liners from the supermarket that you sneak into your trolley and hope no one sees. This is not how we deal with it.

Most of us were told to do our kegels - but it was just once, by some random person in scrubs, immediately after the most exhausting day of our lives, and just never again. Unsurprisingly, research suggests a huge number of women do them incorrectly. They clench the wrong muscles, or they're just holding their breath, or they're accidentally bearing down instead of lifting up. A few more useful moves:

If leaking, heaviness, or "something doesn't feel right down there" is sticking around past the first few months, affecting your day, or just bothering you - guess what? That's reason enough to see your GP or a pelvic health physio. You don't need to hit some arbitrary severity threshold or level just to be allowed to ask for help.