Arizona Midwife | Arizona Homebirth Midwife | Red Rock Midwifery

For as long as I have been touting homebirth, I have been touting midwifery care. For those new to learning about homebirth, the two are not one and the same. Take the documentary, “The Business of Being Born”, for example. A great movie for those in the mainstream to be exposed to the “crazy” idea of homebirth, but not the best example of what midwifery care is all about. Of course, the focus of the movie is really BIRTH–but as a midwife, I have a hard time separating the birth experience from the whole prenatal experience and relationship with the client. I always feel like, if woman knew the care they would get from a midwife for 10 months of their life (and often a lot longer), homebirth wouldn’t really be such a tough sell. It would simply be the natural result, the natural conclusion to a pregnancy that focused on the woman, her family, her desires, her dreams…all in the comfort of her own home.

Anyway, I found the above film to be lacking in really giving an accurate portrayal of prenatal care. Sure, there is a scene or two where you see the midwife taking a blood pressure reading or talking to her client on the phone. I just yearned to see some depiction, some illustration of how complete and thorough a midwife’s care is. Maybe that is not even possible, but I think women need to understand that so much of midwifery care is preventative, whereas is seems that most doctors are trying to solve problems created prenatally at the birth. A midwife’s hope is to solve the issue prenatally, and to not to have to resort to all the interventions at birth, like a hospital often has to.

Let me give you some examples. Nutrition counseling is a huge part of my midwifery care. All kinds of things go into educating the women so that she understands WHY diet is so important and what problems she will likely avoid if she expands her blood volume. So, it is less common for me to see problems at birth related to a constricted blood volume than a doctor might, because there is rarely any focus on nutrition in mainstream medicine. Issues such as premaurity, placental problems, excess bleeding after birth, babies that are small for their age, etc. These are somewhat common issues in the hospital, but instead of heading them off prenatally, they are dealt with as emergency situations. The interventions often “fix” the problem, and so I think the connection between NOT getting great, preventative care is lost. The pitocin, or the magnesium sulfate, or the forceps “solves” the problem that could have well been prevented. Instead of education and empowerment, women in the mainstream medical system are being treated with damage control interventions at the time of birth. One snowballs on top of the other, and it is not that the resulting c-section is completely unnecessary, but that the cascade of events could have been sidelined much, much earlier. Like 9 months earlier.

This is what I want the mainstream mother to know. Not that the interventions at the time of “need” are unnescessary–but that good, preventative midwifery model of care will often help create the kind of situation going INTO birth that requires less intervention. This is not to say that birth with a midwife is perfect, and that there is never any need for medical help. That too is unrealistic. We never know what the exact outcome will be, but is my belief that a normal, healthy mama is best served in the hands of a midwife. There, she will receive outstanding, personalized, individualized care, structured to meet her own physical and emotional needs. There, she and baby will have the best chance of being educated and empowered so that she can avoid common complications, like pre-eclampsia or prematurity. Medicine has never been about solving the problem, but fixing it.

If women would realize that birth is NOT a problem, and that many issues can be avoided or solved prenatally, then the move to using more midwives would be made. If the use of episiotomies and c-sections was saved for real, true emergencies and not damage control, we’d all be a lot better off. As women, as families, and as a society. Birth as a “system” needs to go–and in it’s place we need to provide the midwifery model of care for as many women and babies as we can.