Maryn, you “have been attending births for several years, now”, but you don’t say in what capacity. Are you a primary midwife? I practiced for 25 years and helped over 860 babies enter this world. I am now retired to pursue other areas of my life. When people ask me how many babies have I delivered, I say four, as mothers deliver their own babies.

A lot of what you say is right on with the mother’s body telling her where and in what position to birth. I have experienced many kinds of births and situations. I did suture when needed and very well, too. Perhaps not as  quickly as a doc, but I was not about to transport a mother after a beautiful home birth if there was a tear that required a few stitches. This was not often, but it did happen. Yes, we practiced on beef hearts to know what kind of stitches would be best in varying situations. You do not have the luxury of knowing always, in advance, if a woman will have complications in birthing and that is why, I feel, it is essential to be prepared for any situation with O2 and meds. Thankfully, they were not usually needed. I have saved many moms from C-sections and brought back several babies who were not breathing with my innate skills and tools. I had my share of transports and have seen difficult situations arise in the hospital on more occasions than is usually admitted. Sometimes, the hospital is the right place for that particular birth. I have witnessed enough in my practice to know that there are as many types of births as there are babies being born. It was often hard to get out of my judgmental mind of thinking that I knew the best way for a birth to proceed. Often, because of my experience and guidance, we had a successful outcome when it seemed that we might have complications. I took “risks” when my intuition told me that all was fine and I learned that my best tool was my intuition. I, also, felt that every woman deserved a chance to have a home birth, if that is what she wanted and that her and her baby’s medical well being would not be compromised.

If a midwife is working with the birthing parents with good comprehensive prenatal care, most births at home, without interference are perfect and beautiful. I would much prefer to be a fly on the wall, being alert and watching and letting the parents deliver their own babies. When, I was needed to assist the birth to a good outcome, I did.

I do not speak for other midwives. Interviewing and asking questions are essential in choosing your midwife. There are many signals you get to know who is right for you and the bottom line is to trust your intuition. Whatever your choice is, make sure you are comfortable with it.

May all your births be blessed.

Prema Rose, With all due respect, then you need to get up to date on RESEARCH that shows that oxygen at births is dangerous and so are those “meds”.

Also….Yes, of course saying something like this would provoke controversy. I would like to instigate the idea (and I am not the first one to do so) that a physiological birth at home will rarely bring these complications; especially if nutrition has been paramount throughout pregnancy and the mom is supported in labor and birth without fear. We rarely see PPH unless there is disturbance of the “3rd stage” (or of the birth) and almost always any PPH is due to meddling by the attendant. My point is, as HOMEBIRTH midwives we need to focus on prevention. If a bleed does occur, our job is to figure out the source of the bleed ASAP. Transport may also be appropriate. The more I learn and study, the less appropriate I think it is for drugs to be found at a homebirth. I would not attend a hospital birth at home and if the woman needed medical help, I would not be the one to give that to her at home. I strongly encourage you to look into taking the course on oxygen (whether you are a midwife, or a mother) to understand why this dangerous drug should not be carried AT ALL by homebirth midwives. Jill McDanal (find her on FB) would be the expert on that. Thanks so much for your feedback, and blessings!

 Thanks for your comment….glad it may help you find the support you need for a beautiful, healing and non-interventive birth at home.  Blessings:)

 Sarah-

I am asking you to expand your thinking, not ignore a serious problem should it occur.  I believe, that in most circumstances, the bleed can be prevented.  Think: no induction (even a “natural” one), allow mom’s oxytocin levels to truly be at their highest right when the baby is born but before the placenta (this is, as you know, the peak of oxytocin release with a physiological birth)..not to mention true blood volume expansion that would allow mom to lose blood.  How much interference are you used to seeing with “3rd stage”? Interference is talking to mom, touching her baby, putting a hat on the baby.  Again, I am asking you to consider EVERYTHING you do as potential intervention.  Remember too, that most PPH comes from birth attendants meddling.  We must consider our part more seriously instead of having our focus be on disaster control.  Lastly, should she bleed…what are you gonna do about it?  Why is she bleeding?  Have you tried a piece of the placenta, cord, herbs, homeopathics..is she retaining clots? Again, I urge you in your studies to consider all the possibilities.  Lastly, do your research on pitocin, for example.  Do you know what possible side effects are?  Do you know you could be precipitating a massive late hemorrhage hours later. after you are gone?  Again, I am not advising you to ignore the bleed.  But prevent.  Then problem solve; and if all else fails, you are manually compressing that uterus.  We need to think, think and think…and educate ourselves beyond belief in order to not become complacent.  True midwifery is not medicine, and should not be treated as such.  Thanks for the comment!

 Yes, I agree.  If a babe or mom is in a situation where you “think” oxygen is needed (even if it wouldn’t solve the problem physiologically) then mom or baby or both need to transport.  Let’s stop practicing medical birth at home.

…and Yes, if you are resuscitating a newborn..or anyone….911… for transport to the hospital should have already been called

Are we still subscribing to the “redheads bleed more” rubbish? Having attended many I can only say that, like the vast majority of mothers who own their birth and do it their way, redheads lose little blood and hardly ever have any owrineak trauma that needs more than some honey to heal it. I love these questions.

How about the “right” answers mirroring what the mother wants? That is what is missing for me in most of the questions asked to midwives. The only right answer is that which reflects the mother’s desire.

I’m so excited to have found your site, I’m not pregnant but want to prepare for my next birth! Thanks for all your posts, loving them. I wish we had more midwives to choose from! We only have two in our area 🙁 I was given pitocin because my contractions were only coming from the side and not pushing down or something (would that be a valid reason or do you think my body would have sorted itself out alone?), I was told to push long before my body wanted to and everytime I had a contraction towards the end I had an annoying doula shouting “push in the bum, push in the bum!” Also 2 extremely painful internals. I was exhausted (probably from pushing so hard) and I eventually gave birth to my son on the bed with an episiotomy. They waited a little while to cut the cord and then the midwife pulled the placenta out! I was shaking uncontrolably and had an O2 mask on (do you know why this happens?). This was my “gentle homebirth”. I didn’t ask these questions, didn’t know what to expect so thought I’d trust my “gentle births” midwife and just go with the flow. That’s the last time I will ever trust my birth to someone else. I want to own my next birth, take responsibility and listen only to my body! I have been uneasy about the whole experience since my son was a few months old (he’s now 2) but have just told myself to be happy cause at least I did it ‘naturally’ at home and he was healthy, delayed cord clamping, skin to skin, breastfeeding. But its not OK and now that I’m acknowledging my feelings about it I’m starting to feel much better and can start preparing for our next baby! Sorry for the long msg! Thank you thank you thank you for your website and the work you’re doing!!!!

Yes! So wonderful to see tips like this for women wanting to navigate the tricky task of finding and hiring the right midwife for them.

Someone had commented that the midwife should just answer that she will do whatever the mother wants. Well, this sounds nice and lovely in theory, but the fact is that it is often a cop-out answer – an attempt to provide a vague answer that the midwife thinks will appease the mom, but actually says very little about how she practices. I have experienced it first-hand and have witnessed it time and again where the midwife answers all of these sorts of questions in a way that seems acceptable but then later on, when it is too late to easily fire her and hire a different midwife, when it is critical such as when presented with a situation such as a false diagnosis of gestational diabetes, or – even worse – during or close to the birth itself, the midwife changes her tune entirely.

An example. I had an interesting experience that is somewhat relevant. I am a midwifery student. I hired a local midwife for the prenatal care during my last pregnancy. I was having a freebirth, but for the purposes of official documentation, I hired the midwife for my prenatal care. Luckily, I had a good idea of how to take care of myself and what I wanted (much to her chagrin LOL), and I was not so easily manipulated into doing things I did not want to do. (Most women, I believe, cave much easier to such pressure, though! Not because they are weak but because they are not armed with the full range of information I am privy to as a midwifery student.)

I stated very firmly what I wanted. Midwife agreed and said absolutely no problem. She knew I was a midwifery student and, at the onset, said she was eager for us to share this time together so we could “talk shop”. She said she was in complete agreement and supported my choices. Well, that was nice. Except she didn’t. When it came down to it, she merely said that to placate me at the moment and later used every passive-aggressive and downright coercive tactic she could come up with to bully me into “consenting” (consent under coercion is not consent, by the way) to what she actually wanted me to do. This went for everything under the sun. In the end, she didn’t care one bit about what I or what other mothers want. She only cared about covering her ass in the event of a bad outcome. She disregarded my intuition and my own abilities to palpate my own belly to determine baby’s position and listen on the fetoscope to determine placenta position. If she did that to me, she sure as hell certainly does that to the other mothers she serves.

As time wore on, we had increasingly more and more heated disagreements. Initially I engaged in these disagreements because, even though I knew what I wanted already (and she was not going to change my mind) and I knew I was not having her there for my birth, I am a midwifery student and I am passionate and I was interested in her reasoning and opinions. She initially pretended to be interested in my opinions. But it gradually became clearer that she was not interested in hearing about what I had learned or was learning, or any studies or evidence that what she wanted me to do was not evidence-based. It was about her ego and asserting her way of doing things.

Eventually I stopped engaging with her on anything but the bare minimum, because it became too stressful for me. But my story is not unique. I hear it all the time from others, except those others often/usually end up getting bullied along to agreeing to whatever the midwife wants her to do. Sometimes they yield to her because of her authority, sometimes because it is very hard in pregnancy to stand up against someone else, and sometimes because they just don’t know where to find information to support their heart and their intuition.

THAT is why Indie Birth and the work you are doing is so important. I share the information on your site with everyone who asks me for advice. Thank you for all that you do. Keep it up!

I think there needs to be a nation-wide aresenaws-raising campaign. Here’s a suggestion: What if homebirth groups and their networks could co-ordinate to bombard the media with ‘born at home’ birth announcements accompanied by the traditional mother/baby images (not birth photos, I mean) and how wonderful would it be if those pictures went back decades and decades to demonstrate that babies born at home are just like babies born everywhere else?This is something small that any individual can easily do that on a grand scale has the potential to make a powerful statement to the Australian public and policy makers.