I'm not a big believer in wands. Way too phallocentric for me. I'd like to wave a conch shell or similar to get men to experience childbirth. Just once each. Just one 12-hour labour followed by a 4.7kg baby squirming through and giving one last wriggle before freedom. Bigger than a watermelon.

A lot happens during childbirth, let me tell you. If you are lucky, you get a few hours of gentle rolling contractions before the real earthmoving sets in. Sometimes it feels like you are being ripped from pillar to post. Sometimes you actually are ripped from pillar to post. It can take years to recover.

And the first person I'd wave my conch shell at? Scott Morrison. On Wednesday, as Katie Burgess wrote, the prime minister caused a mass uproar among the women of Australia.

The member for Canberra Alicia Payne asked the prime minister if he thought it was OK for women to travel more than an hour from Yass to either Canberra or Goulburn to give birth.

Yass hasn't had specialist maternity services since 2004. Instead of recognising the gravity of the situation, the prime minister used the opportunity to plug a multi-million dollar upgrade to the Barton Highway. Apparently, you can drive to the nearest hospital faster now.

Yass Valley Times (second edition out now) editor Jasmin Jones had her third baby in an ambulance by the side of the Barton Highway in a guide map bay nine years ago this Saturday. Her son was part of the massive increase in what's described as "born before arrival" babies - calculated at 46 per cent across Australia between 1992 and 2011 at the same time specialist maternity services were closed down across the country.

The fact is maternity services across Australia are not at the level Australian women need and deserve. It's not too bad in the big metropolitan hospitals but the further away you get from the big cities, the worse it gets. Maternity services get switched on and off like taps. And women and their babies are put at risk.

Bronwyn Fredericks, the pro vice-chancellor of Indigenous engagement at the University of Queensland, has spent years researching health impacts on remote and rural communities and was the presiding commissioner into the 2017 Queensland Productivity Commission's report on service delivery in remote and discrete Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

She says women, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in many regional, rural and remote communities, are often forced to leave their homes and communities weeks ahead of giving birth in order to receive the appropriate maternal services.

"It might involve travelling hundreds or thousands of kilometres away to a larger regional centre or major city. It may also mean that they are separated from their family, including their partners and children and other support during this time," she says.

It's one of the reasons Payne is campaigning for better maternity care. Her first child is two and she's expecting her second in September.

She knows precisely how fortunate she is to be able to get to Canberra Hospital in a few minutes flat. After all, Paul was born in just five hours and second babies are notoriously quicker.

"Knowing how anxious mothers are anyhow - and then you've got a long drive to get to the hospital in addition to that anxiety - it's so important for mothers not to have added stress," she says.

Of course, we are bang smack in the middle of a byelection campaign for the breath holding seat of Eden-Monaro with polling day on July 6 (although it's more like polling month considering how long pre-polling is open these days and candidates have to be on all the time). And Yass Hospital, which doesn't have specialist maternity services any more, is bang smack in the middle of the Eden-Monaro electorate so it pays to bring this into the debate for the 200 or so women who have to make the trek along the Barton Highway to deliver their babies.

Kristy McBain, the Labor candidate for the unsafe seat and the former mayor for Bega Valley Shire Council, is a mother of three. Normally I'd be reluctant to define women by their reproductive status but this issue is all about babies and how we have them. She was lucky because Bega Hospital was close and excellent but the women of Yass and surrounds, an area that's growing in population, don't have that access.

I got a hold of the Liberal candidate for Eden-Monaro Fiona Kotvojs to see if she, too, thought Morrison's long drive was the answer to a real shortage of maternity services. "The care of mothers and their babies is critical and must be determined by medical experts ... I support the NSW state government moving to review the needs of Yass women," she says.

Right now there are not enough midwives, obstetricians, specialist child nurses to go around. Because of the impact of COVID-19 on medical practices, even some of our GPs may disappear. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners surveyed 1000 GPs and practices and the results were shocking. Nearly half of the respondents said they weren't sure whether they would be around in six months. The GP rebate is far too low and the government doesn't seem too keen to provide a significant boost to Medicare.

But all of this goes to the people who make the decisions about women's bodies. It astonishes me that Scott Morrison thought it was OK to boost the highway upgrade in response to a question about maternity services in regional Australia.

Which is why I need my magic conch shell. With a flick of a wrist I could show the prime minister exactly why women need the best support the medical system can muster. Women shouldn't have to deliver watermelons by the roadside.