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 sneeze. And yet, somewhere below deck, there's a small but unmistakable "uh oh." You laugh at a friend's joke and cross your legs on reflex, like a woman defusing a bomb. You see a trampoline at a kids' birthday party and your first thought isn't "fun," it's "absolutely not."

If any of that sounds familiar, congratulations - you have a pelvic floor, and it has 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 (yet). But this quiet, unglamorous sling of muscle sitting between your hip bones is doing more unpaid overtime than anyone in your household. Think of it as a hammock strung between your pubic bone and your tailbone, holding up your bladder, bowel and uterus, while also acting as the bouncer at the door for wee, poo and, once upon a time, an actual human. It's basically the unpaid intern of your anatomy: does all the important work, gets none of the credit, and nobody trained it properly before throwing it in the deep end.

Pregnancy and birth ask an extraordinary amount of this hammock. Whether you delivered vaginally or by caesarean, nine months of extra weight, hormonal softening of your connective tissue, and the main event itself can leave that hammock feeling more like a stretched-out old singlet. It doesn't mean it's broken. It means it's been through a genuine athletic event and nobody gave it a medal.

Here's the bit where we get serious for a moment, because the stats are honestly more validating than a group chat full of "omg SAME."

Specifically for mums, the most quoted figure is that 1 in 3 women who've ever had a baby will experience incontinence at some point.

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

Translation: if you're still leaking a 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 kids' party in case of emergency.

Here's the annoying part. Despite being spectacularly common, bladder leakage after babies has historically been filed under "just part of motherhood," passed down like a Tupperware set nobody wanted, mentioned in hushed tones by your own mother, maybe joked about at a baby shower, but rarely actually treated. The good news is that's 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 a goal. Translation: this is no longer something you're meant to just quietly manage in beige liners for the next forty years.

Most of us were told to "do your Kegels" once, by someone in scrubs, immediately after the most exhausting day of our lives, and never again. Unsurprisingly, research suggests a huge number of women do them incorrectly - clenching the wrong muscles, holding their breath, or 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 - that's reason enough to see your GP or a pelvic health physio. You don't need to hit some arbitrary severity threshold to be allowed to ask for help.