BIRTH PHILOSOPHY
Birth is the intimate provenance of the mother or birthing person, baby, and family.
Ultimately, the decisions made concerning your pregnancy and birth, are yours to make. Families that choose home birth benefit from highly individualized care, a more personal relationship with, and more time spent with their care provider, and the pleasure of greeting their new baby in the comfort and familiarity of their own homes. Families choosing home birth also take on a greater level of responsibility and accountability for their care decisions and pregnancy and birth outcomes. As a midwife, I work closely with you using an informed choice and low-intervention, collaborative model of care. I support your right to choose your place of birth and the people that attend it. You may seek out a variety of of resources to educate yourself. You choose the location that you feel safe and capable in.
It's your birth, your baby, your family.
Childbirth is natural and normal and instinctual. Your body is strong and intuitive.
You deserve support and care that aligns with your goals and considers your needs and desires as paramount to your and your baby's greatest well-being. Many common interventions, however well intended or wisely decided upon, have the potential to interfere with this and can alter the normal course of labor and birth. That fact does not make birth dangerous, nor does it rule out clinical tools as potentially useful or beneficial. Instead, it begs us to ask the questions:
"Is this intervention necessary? For whom? What are the benefits and risks, both of agreeing to the intervention or of choosing not to? Are there other options? What happens if we wait? What happens if we do nothing?”
Birth is not inherently a medical event, though you may have medical conditions or complications that warrant medical treatment, consultation, or transfer of care.
As a midwife, I will support your right to make conscious choices, provide ongoing education about what is normal and how best to support normal physiology. We will thoroughly discuss deviations from normal, care options and midwifery care recommendations. I will provide medical referral as necessary or requested, and work with you to plan your individual preferences in a non-judgmental and loving way.
As your midwife, I am present at your birth to help monitor your and your baby's health and wellness during your labor; to provide guidance, knowledge, experience, skilled risk-assessment, suggestions (and yes, sometimes specific midwifery skills or interventions, with your express consent), that support safe, joyful, and spontaneous birth; and to facilitate the connection between you and your partner and/or other chosen attendants. I can act to help ground you as labor intensifies; to provide emotional support, comfort and mobility suggestions based on your unique labor; to assist your spouse or partner to understand and feel confident in both supporting you and in the labor process; to address concerns or questions as they arise; and to help set an environment which supports your birth choices and honors your autonomy.
I believe that birth is, in effect, a conscious becoming.
What does this mean? It simply means that both you and your baby are active participants during your labor, and that labor works best when you are able to work responsively together. It means that birthing a baby is both an act of trust and surrender and an act of profound power. A contraction and an expansion. A deep dive and a sweet rise. You are birthing your beautiful baby and your labor is literally the bridge your child crosses from you into the world and the arc of your baby's very first memories. The work is hard, humbling, breathtaking, and often surprising. The informed decisions you make and the actions you take in preparing for birth are not guarantees of a birth-gone-perfectly-planned, but an acknowledgement of your inner wisdom, essential connection to your body and baby & your right to self-determination.
A bit more on my approach
I trust and respect physiological birth and I trust and respect my clients to make choices, even if they choose something outside of the "norm". I am a grounded and observant midwife, allowing time and space for birth to unfold, normally, and healthfully. I am confident, communicative, and skilled when midwifery interventions are considered or emergency care is necessary. I don't "do things" to people. I collaborate with them.
Choosing your midwife is, at least in part, an exercise in choosing someone you feel comfortable with and connected to. Training, education, and excellent clinical skills are very important, and help promote a safe, healthy pregnancy and birth experience for you and your baby, but midwifery is also about heart, intuition, choice, and the power of presence. And it is the combination of all these things that creates the trust and relationship that makes the prenatal, home birth, and the postpartum experience with a midwife very different than the typical hospital and medical-model style of care.