Episode 9: Cheryl does midwifery

I could have called her a midwife, but isn’t the word midwifery (pronounced MID-wiff-ree) cool? 

Midwives act as emotional support, an educational resource and healthcare advocates for pregnant women. Roughly 97% of Cheryl’s mothers want a home birth. And 85% of them will have a home birth, with 15% going to a hospital instead. This is a hands-on relationship, with long, regularly scheduled appointments to check up with expectant mothers and their partners and listen to them and their concerns. It’s a close relationship, with many families coming back more than once for repeated home births. 

“We’re coming to your environment, and we’re helping you to have your baby your way,” Gates says. 

It’s a matter of preference. Other expectant mothers will only relax and feel safe in a bed at a top-notch hospital to give birth. Cheryl remembers, after a brain injury, how nice it was to get out of the hospital and into her own bed at home. She doesn’t dig hospitals. 

The clients she can’t, in good conscience, take on? Those who say “no matter what” they won’t go to the hospital for a birth. That’s a dangerous choice, she says, as the health of mother and child before, during or after birth may necessitate a move to the hospital. 

“You have to be willing to get help when you need it,” she says, “because that’s how it stays safe.” 

Learn about what life is like for a midwife and for expectant mothers who don’t want to give birth in a hospital, what racism looks like in the hospital room, and how one generation’s bad childbirth experiences can haunt the next. 

 (Photo courtesy Pixabay; no, that's not a Cheryl-midwifed baby)

 

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

> Learn more about what midwives and nurse-midwives do as well as doulas. 

> It was only one incident in many years of midwife work, but Cheryl mentions years ago that one healthcare provider had a sign on the wall that said expectant mothers who had a doula or had taken a Bradley class were not accepted as patients. The American College of Nurse-Midwives and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (what Cheryl calls “ACOG” in the podcast) play nice together now. 

> Twilight sleep, knocking expectant mothers out during childbirth, many strapped to their beds, was totally a thing. Yuck. 

> Cheryl mentions the 2008 documentary The Business of Being Born (The Business of Birth Control is up next from the filmmakers.) You can stream it free right now. Here are a few reviews here, here and here.