The Most Scientific Birth Is Often the Least Technological Birth

When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who elects to birth with a midwife rather than with an obstetrician, they generally describe a woman who wears long cotton skirts, braids her hair, eats only organic vegan food, does yoga, and maybe drives a VW microbus. What they don't envision is the omnivorous, pants-wearing science geek standing before them.

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Apologies To The Parents I Judged Four Years Ago

By Kara Gebhart Uhl from The Huffington Post

To the Parents I Knew Four Years Ago: I'm Sorry

I have come to realize many things since having three children. For example, I now know that I can read "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" seven times in a row without going insane. No matter what people say, throw-up is throw-up and I don't care if it is my daughter who is throwing up but her throw-up makes me want to throw up. I am a really fast diaper changer. And it's true: love does not split, but grows with additional children.

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Set Up a Birth Altar For Focus and Guidance During Labor

When prepping for birth, there are so many medical and physical factors to consider – but your emotional state is also something that is incredibly important. Along with learning deep breathing, and methods such as Hypnobithing to help you through labor, there are things you can put together to help give you focus as well. One of those things is a ‘birth altar.’

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Warning Signs to Look for in Your Care Provider

Written by Muscat Midwife

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift” - Albert Einstein

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Emergency C-Sections, Incubators, & Hospital Protocol: Men Experience Birth Trauma, Too

by Birth Without Fear on August 28, 2011

Birth trauma is very real and probably much more frequent than women in our society realize. But birth trauma is not exclusive to the moms and babies. We dads experience birth trauma, too, but in a very different, very mentally draining way.

Postpartum Depression for Men?

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Retreat at The Farm

Are you tired of witnessing women being violated during birth and feeling powerless to stop the train wreck happening before your eyes? Do you wonder how there can possibly be such a giant gap between what medical research recommends and the standard procedures in hospitals? Do you wonder how the United States can spend more money than other countries on maternity care and have worse outcomes? Or how it is possible, in a time of technical advances and improvements in our health, that maternal mortality in the U.S. can be on the rise? Are you ready to stop being a bystander and work for change?

Let’s stop talking about how bad things are and do something. Let’s come together, gather our allies, learn from the people who have improved maternity care in their communities and lay the groundwork for a full-scale birth revolution! Join the national grassroots movement to change maternity care.

Where’s My Midwife? invites you to spend a weekend at the Farm in Tennessee, plotting and scheming, coming up with activities that can be carried out in any community at any time for little to no money. These activities will raise public awareness about our broken maternity care system, and draw attention to the methods that are producing better results for mothers and babies. We need to put public pressure on the people, organizations and businesses in positions of power and hold them accountable for improving outcomes.

If you are ready to take the next step, join us June 22nd through the 24th at our first annual Birth Activists Retreat. For more information, e-mail us at info@wheresmymidwife.org.

And remember, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Childbirth: A Different Way to Remove the Placenta May Save Mothers’ Lives, a Study Finds

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: March 12, 2012

Delivery without pulling on the umbilical cord may be a simpler way to keep some women from bleeding to death in childbirth, a new study has found.

In Africa and Asia, postpartum hemorrhage kills a third of the women who die in childbirth, and health agencies constantly struggle to refine midwife training to prevent those deaths. (Above, a maternity ward in Sudan.)

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