It is through understanding the complete, unabridged nature of our blueprint for mammalian birth that we may reclaim and experience what is possible for us as women and mothers. Planning to give birth at home gives women the greatest chance of having the normal, physiologic birth experience designed for humans.

Giving birth at home with skilled midwives also happens to be the safest plan for the majority of pregnant women and babies, precisely because it allows birth to unfold normally without unnecessary intervention.

While feeling safe and supported, women can tap into their own deep wells of inner strength and move through labor with their own resources, finding new depths to their power and capacity.

We are wired for connection. At home, mothers and babies are usually able to live out their full hormonal blueprint for an efficient labor, beta-endorphin pain relief, blissful bonding and falling in love, and easy breastfeeding.

Midwives are invited attendants into the family’s domain. Birth is a family centered experience. Homebirth keeps the family in charge and the woman at the center.

Fathers and partners are much more likely to feel close to the experience, relevant, and needed. They are more likely to feel at ease, and to have immediate bonding.

Siblings are able to participate as little or as much as they would like, in a comfortable way that naturally arises from being in their own space. There is no foreign, clinical environment to adjust to. Children feel naturally safe and relaxed in their home and are familiar with the midwife who they know is helping their mother. It makes sense to them. Birth is experienced as a normal, family event. A baby is not “brought home,” a baby emerges from her mother and is welcomed into the family, together.

Breastfeeding success rates are much higher in the home setting for a few reasons. Women are more relaxed. Babies are more relaxed. They are spending more time skin to skin and resting. Women do not have to leave their home and travel by car for postpartum care. There is no disruption in the postpartum cocoon. Midwives usually come see women in their homes multiple times in the first week after birth.

Babies born at home are exponentially more likely to become properly colonized with their mother’s microbes, priming their immune system for lifelong health. Further, they experience the normal microbiome colonization with the flora unique to their family home. They are much less likely to be born with antibiotics in their system. This affords them the best start for immune regulation and protection against chronic disease.

Huge decrease in the risk of infection.

Huge decrease in the risk of cesarean / abdominal surgery.

Recovery after birth is more likely to be normal and easeful following a physiologic birth with regular in-home care.

Women are much more likely to begin their work of mothering feeling competent and wise. Fully supported by a midwife who has been cheerleading them the entire way, who understands the importance of mother-baby connection.

Models of Maternity Care

There are two models of maternity care in the United States. The medical model, called obstetrics, and the midwifery model, which is mostly found out-of-hospital. The medical model of care is founded upon a medical understanding of pregnancy and birth and standardizing the experience within a hospital setting. The medical approach to birth is best suited to women who have significant disease states and/or who use high-risk medications in pregnancy that significantly increase the risk of complications in pregnancy or to the baby after birth.

The midwifery model of care is founded upon a physiologic and holistic understanding of pregnancy as a biological, social, and highly personal experience. Women are provided individualized care that focuses on prevention, healthy mothers, autonomy, nourishment, embodied births, and emotional satisfaction. The midwifery model is best suited to women who want personalized care and who want to be the primary decision maker.

Midwives help keep pregnancy and birth normal. We do this by building a close relationship with women over time, built upon safety, mutual respect, and expert knowledge of childbearing physiology. We provide excellent nutritional guidance and lifestyle care during pregnancy that vastly minimizes the risk of complications. We distinguish normal variation from medical problems and treating women accordingly.

When seeing midwives, women are offered the same tests and procedures as performed in the medical model of care. A key difference is that we discuss these things, like the gestational diabetes test, well in in advance. We fully cover all of the risks, benefits, and alternatives of any given procedure, but we never make the decisions for our clients. They are in the driver’s seat. They are supported in making their own informed, autonomous decisions about what is right for them and their babies.

Women can start midwifery care from the moment they are pregnant. Physicians are consulted on an as-need basis for healthy women. This page by the National Partnership for Women and Families is an excellent starting point for exploring the start of your maternity care.

The Midwifery Model of Care:

• The woman is at the center.
• A non-hierarchical structure of care based on mutual respect
• Her emotional, mental and social health are just as important as her physical health.
• Complications and Interventions are minimized through active prevention and high-touch, hands on care.
• Promotes relaxation, intimacy, freedom of movement over protocols.
• Prioritizes continuity of care with the same provider over rotating staff.

Henci Goer, an expert in maternity care models states:

The best judgments will be made by caregivers who are familiar with the woman and whose presence on the scene enables them to pick up subtleties that would be missed by someone who doesn’t know her and pops in now and then. Small problems can be addressed before they become big ones, and overreaction can be avoided because the caregiver has context and perspective.

Every obstetric intervention carries risk as well as benefit. When interventions are used with women who don’t need them, on a routine or “just in case” basis, or on women whose problem could be resolved by waiting or by simple, risk free measures such as: walking, change of position, talking over worries, or a warm bath, than those women are exposed to the risks without any chance of benefit.

The end result is that some women and babies will develop complications, minor or major, that never would have occurred had they not been subjected to the intervention. This truth is why numerous studies examining individual procedures, drugs and restrictions have consistently concluded that outcomes are equally good and often better with restricted use of the intervention. Likewise, numerous studies comparing outcomes between low-risk women receiving standard obstetric management versus similar women receiving the less interventive, midwifery style of care have found that women and their babies receiving the midwifery style of care did equally well or better.

My Birth Philosophy

Women have been guardians of birth and mothering since the beginning. Birth belongs to women and babies.

Becoming mother takes a full year of exquisite heart, body, and soul metamorphosis. Cellularly, emotionally, spiritually, she becomes a new woman. Love, personified.

Midwifery is about holding women. Honoring women giving birth to themselves. Holding sacred space. Life, death, rebirth.

The childbearing years are a continuum of a woman’s lived experience of her body, her pregnancy, being her baby’s first environment, her emergence as source, creator and sustainer of life.

How we show up for women through this continuum is a reflection of how we view women, birth, babies, life itself. How women are guided through the birth portal matters, because how mothers are born matters. How babies are born, matters.

Birth is not one isolated event in time. Birth is a continuum of all the prenatal readying, reveling, and inquiry. Birth is the the making of the mother, the emergence of the baby, and their awakening to the purest love that can be experienced. Birth is the ancient and wild process that tethers humans to one another, and to the spirit door.

As the life givers– the people through whom all humans are born– women embody life and creation at the most foundational level. Women are source. They create, release, and create again. Women carry the the blood mysteries from menarche to menopause in their DNA, and in their hearts. Women transmit the power and sacredness of these mysteries to future generations. Patriarchal societies have severed women from their wisdom and power and disrupted the transmission of that wisdom and power. Ancestral childbearing traditions must be returned to women for the success and happiness of our species. Rooted, embodied, fierce women are the most important ingredient for healthy families, communities and ecosystems.

Birth is designed to be pleasurable and joyful for women, as much as it is physically demanding. This is nature’s assurance that our species will continue to make babies. It is every woman’s birth right to experience the sensual, joyful, even ecstatic experience of birth and mothering, if she chooses. Skilled, attuned support from women and providers who understand physiologic birth can mean the difference here.

Babies also have the right to be born pleasurably, in deep connection with mother, in their own time, in their own way. Babies are born ready to fall in love with their mothers and are entirely dependent upon them for a multitude of hormonal and biological processes that promote their lifelong physical and emotional health. This is their birth right. The experience of being skin to skin with zero separation is expected by the baby, and her whole biology is organized around this expectation. The most current, real-world clinical research and well-executed randomized controlled clinical trials demonstrate that skin to skin mother-baby care immediately after birth with zero separation promotes the best outcomes for survival for even the tiniest premature babies.

The safest, most pleasurable, most transformative births tend to be those with the least interference, medical or otherwise. Through my lived experience and direct observation witnessing women move through the birth door for almost thirty years has taught me that birth usually works best in the safety and comfort of women’s own homes. Women’s bodies innately know how to grow a baby and to give birth. Birth usually works best when women are given the freedom and privacy to birth spontaneously and uninterrupted. Attempts to quicken, sanitize, control, or standardize the birth process typically derail the blueprint for success, adversely affect the outcome, and makes birth less pleasurable for women and babies. Sometimes these efforts are the best choice when mothers and babies face are truly in danger, and we do the repair work afterwards, facilitated by immediate skin to skin.

The vast majority of healthy women can give birth without medical assistance. The ability give birth instinctively is encoded in our DNA and retained in our cellular matrix.

For most women, the process of surrendering to the mystery of birth, of going into the deepest darkest cave alone, and allowing her mammalian body to take over and birth the baby– is made easier by the presence of an experienced woman holding the space. A skilled, calm, intuitive and and discerning guide who knows when to sit on her hands, and when to take action in service to the safety and ease of birth.

Men’s parallel initiation into fatherhood is a source of purpose and pleasure and also integral to the health and safety of the family. The role of the father or partner at birth is one of protector, guardian, space holder. Homebirth restores this organic, practical and ancestral role of the man, thus bolstering his confidence and capacity to support his woman in primal, embodied, and loving ways. Witnessing women give birth heightens men’s understanding of women as sacred life givers, requiring their fiercest safeguarding and reverence. This is how men mature into fatherhood.

Community midwives have assisted women since we were early humans, tending to all aspects of female health, fertility, birth, plant medicine, birth control, and mothering. In order to keep the lineage of wisdom intact for future generations, midwives must double down in the face of adversity and persecution and continue to hold space for the wild nature of birth and the capacity of women to birth spontaneously, joyfully, and without medical interference.

There is an appropriate place for western medicine in childbirth. Modern obstetrics has contributed life-saving procedures and treatments to maternal and infant health. Most good midwives do not hesitate to use midwifery and obstetrical interventions for the safest outcome when necessary for the best outcome. Medical technologies should be applied judiciously and consciously to high risk women and babies when it is likely to result in safer outcomes. I am grateful for the mutually respectful collaborative relationships I have with physicians. When medical intervention is truly warranted, women and babies have the best outcomes and most satisfying experiences when midwives and physicians work together to support woman-centered, physiological birth, postpartum, and biological baby bonding.

The convergence of academic fields that underscore the necessity of woman-centered, humanized, birth and infant experiences along with healthy maternal-child attachment for the success and happiness of our species is the most needed medicine of our times. Research in child development, public health, neurobiology, epigenetics, evolutionary anthropology, pre and perinatal psychology, microbiome medicine, sociology, somatics, and international maternal and child health authorities all support a return to physiologic birth and biological baby bonding across all settings and resources.