Authentic Midwifery: serving women outside the medical system
What care can look like with a traditional birth attendant
What is a Traditional Birth Attendant?
Also known as an authentic midwife, a birth keeper, or a lay midwife a traditional birth attendant is a woman who walks with women in pregnancy, birth, the postpartum period and beyond.
Birth is not a medical event, but rather a physiological process, similar to elimination or menstruation.
As such, birth does not inherently require medical attention or supervision, but rather birth thrives with privacy and support.
Traditional birth attendants are deeply familiar and trusting of women and of the birth process. By providing grounded, sisterly love, paired with biological wisdom, we see and support mothers through the portal of birth.
Do physiological processes sometimes require medical support?
Sure.
For example, pooing is a physiological event that, on rare occasions, necessitates medical intervention. In such situations, we are so grateful to access medical support. But those instances do not make pooping, as a whole, a medical process.The same is true for birth.
Birth attendants are authentic midwives, rather than MEDwives, attending to the physiological, non-medical, needs of birth.
If a traditional birth attendant were to attend to your pregnancy and birth, what would she do?
That depends on what you are looking for – but it all starts with a conversation and deep listening.
“How do you envision your ideal birth? How can I support bringing your vision to fruition?”
The answers to these questions determine her role as your birth keeper.
When serving you during your pregnancy, we block off time for prenatal connection sessions, usually a few per trimester.
Each session may last a few hours. These meetings look different for every woman.
We may go for a hike, cook healthy food, help you hear your baby’s heartbeat, or sit and talk.
We make time to talk about self-responsibility and to visualize your ideal birth. We discuss your fears: identifying, unpacking, and transforming them into power.
We meet with everyone who will be attending your birth, answering questions and bonding with the family. Together, we organize around a joyful birth and a blissful postpartum.
When your birthing time arrives, we are here for you.
On-call for several weeks surrounding your birth, with no such thing as a baby coming too early or too late.
We come to you if and when you call, holding space and witnessing you as you move through the fire walk of birth.
We offer reassurance, focus, praise, and birth wisdom, if and when it’s needed.
We trust YOU and we trust birth as you bring your baby earthside.
Postpartum is the time sacred integration.
We attend to you as much as is possible and desired, often spending some time every day for the first few days, cleaning, cooking, marveling, and processing the birth.
We then come by at least every week or so, bringing home cooked food, and other treasures and nurturing practices.
And we listen: To your miraculous birth story. To your physical and emotional needs. To you.
When the time is right, we offer ceremony to complete the birth, and close the chapter.
Women own birth. And this is what it looks like when women support women.
• No hospital transfers due to being “post dates”, or long labors, or conflict with the licensure.
• No unwanted cervical checks or required fetal heart tones (neither of which improve maternal or fetal outcomes).
• No medicalization of a physiological process
• No relative strangers observing you during your time of greatest intimacy and power.
Just reverence, and wisdom and sisterhood.
Want more information about how we handle emergencies, the what-ifs of hospital transfer, and our thoughts on birth centers and regulated midwives? Shoot me an email and let’s chat.
