Kenny Gibson has a risky ‘ice-breaker’ for when he meets pregnant women the first time, in the throes of labour.

“I tell them, I’ve had three kids and it didn’t hurt a bit,” he laughs.

Kenny, 37, is the only male midwife in the West of Scotland and one of just a handful delivering babies in maternity units across the country.

And while he loves his job supporting women and their partners through the pain and euphoria of childbirth and says the majority are happy to be treated by a man. 

The 37-year-old former pub manager, says some older midwives actually refused to work with him at the start of his career.

One of his most memorable births, in his ten-year career, was delivering a 14lb baby in a labour that involved ‘no drugs’ and he also helped bring his first child into the world, after the newly qualified midwife panicked.

Kenny, who trained at the old Irvine Central Hospital, says: “When I started there was 49,000 midwives in the UK and 109 were men.

“There were six registered in Scotland when I qualified. It is very much a female world.

“You go in (to labour room) and the question is always, ‘Do any mothers not want you?’ You do get refusals but they are very rare.

“If you asked my mates, they would probably say, I’m the last person on earth they would expect to be a midwife.

“It’s just fun and it’s interesting.

“You see the women going from calm to sore, to really sore to losing it, to having a baby and then being high again.

“I actually think the delivery part is over-rated. It’s the bringing the women through labour that I like. It’s a rollercoaster.”

Kenny’s wife Arlene, 35, is also a midwife. The pair met at college in Paisley, now the University for the West of Scotland and work in the same ward at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.

His first ever birth, however, while training, was not straightforward – a delivery that occurs in around 1 in 80,000 births.

He says: “I trained down in Ayrshire, so it was down in the old Irvine Central and the baby was born in the amniotic sac, so it was quite unusual. It was just me and a midwife but I had seen a few of them before, during training so it was fine.”