I find that most women are choosing a home birth experience because they want to maintain some sort of control over the process over what happens with their body, and they really want to feel like it’s their choice and they have the freedom to move around and get in any position they want to get in and eat what they want to eat, drink—purely freedom and the experience. So as a midwife, when we attend someone’s home birth, it’s our role to really set up that safety for them that baby’s fine, they’re fine, now—go have the birth process that’s instinctual for you. We set up all of our equipment, our oxygen tanks, our anti-hemorrhage drugs, our IV supplies, resuscitation equipment. All of that is there in addition to our herbs and our homeopathy and our essential oils and our oils for rubbing mom, so that she can call upon what she needs when she needs it, or that when we see that there’s a need for something that we can use it. We don’t generally use the emergency equipment, but we’re trained in how to do so and it’s there when we need it. So, during a normal birth process, mom is moving about as she feels that is her instinct to do so. And we offer support in the way of—“Well, you know, you might try this, or you might try that”—if it’s something that she needs. Otherwise, we just provide the safety container for her to have the process that is natural for her. We listen to the baby, we check mom’s vitals during the whole birth process just to ensure that everything’s running smoothly. And then at the birth, we make sure that mom isn’t bleeding too much, that baby’s transitioning into the postpartum, afterbirth period smoothly. You know, and if we need to support the child in the process, we’re there to do that, we’re trained on how to do that—it’s generally not an issue.

What’s so amazing about a woman when she’s delivering her child is that she has the capacity to step into what is definitely the most challenging experience she’s going to confront in her life physically, and sometimes emotionally as well. And I feel that it’s my role to really support her in mirroring to her how powerful, how strong she is, and how capable she is at actually birthing herself as a mother and birthing her child into this world.

Birth is a natural, physiological process. It’s not a medical condition. Nowhere in the medical texts is birth considered a medical condition. So that being said, birth is natural. It happens. Midwives and doctors are there to support when needed, but this baby knows the way out. The woman’s body—if she knows how to get pregnant, she knows how to give birth. It’s instinctual within the cells of our body. It is the precise reason we were created physiologically—to get pregnant, to contain gestation and pregnancy within us, and to give birth. It doesn’t have to happen here [pointing to head]; it happens here [our whole body] and our body knows how to do it.