As well as being an adored wife and mother, Annette was also a passionate home-birth midwife. She loved women deeply. She believed strongly in women being treated with respect in birth, and she ensured that every woman she cared for felt loved and heard.

Annette asked me to take this photo of her just sixteen days before she died. The irony was not lost on her that she was dying of a reproductive-system cancer, and that she now resembled a pregnant woman herself. Her belly that had carried four babies including a set of twins was full of tumours. But even amid this brutally unfair time, Annette still advocated for women, bringing awareness to the cruelty of ovarian cancer and the need for an early-detection test.