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When I began my life as a midwife, I started in the traditional model of apprenticeship. An older, very experienced midwife whom I revered took me under her wing. I would do anything to help at a birth and was often given the task of cleaning up. I was young. I wasn’t tainted by financial gain. I spent a lot of money in gas, driving the midwife to births (this was in Israel where gas is $4.00 a gallon), and it wouldn’t have occurred to me in a thousand years to ask for compensation. When I heard, years later, the midwife had gotten divorced, I mourned the loss of my innocence. I had thought she was perfect.

 Read more…. Midwifery Etiquette

The work of birth is ancient, passing from generation to generation of women throughout human history. The knowledge and wisdom of birth is woman’s heritage.

 Read more…. Women In Birth

In any new practice, there seems to be a run of transports, which allows the new person on the team to see how they are done. Transports are certainly not a favorite activity in midwifery, but they are a very real part of the work. Since returning to birth in October 2001, after a five-year hiatus, I have had nine transports in 23 births (two babies and one postpartum mom, all the rest in first or second stage of labor); these are not the best statistics, to say the least. One would assume that all this karmic transport stuff was for my education, but I have long been familiar and very comfortable with the emergency and nonemergency transport of mother and/or baby. Besides giving and receiving training sessions with EMS around the country, I also have discussed the anatomy of a transport on several occasions with my partner, Sarah, who is a deputy sheriff.

 Read more…. Transports: Making a Seamless Transition

I think instinctive birth is the knowledge of birth that all women have encoded in their DNA. We don’t need a class to understand it. The eons of birthing women who came before have brought us to this place today. But in this generation, we wonder where it is, how to reach it and how to use it. To connect to our instincts, we need to be quiet. Instincts do not shout; they whisper. How do we help the new “Eve” hear this voice? When the mom tries to hear the baby’s heart with a fetascope, we tell her to “feel” the beat against her ear.

 Read more…. Listening To Eve

A vision of Birth came to me in the months after I gave birth to Zoe, my second baby. As I meditated on the challenges that I had encountered during my labor, I began to see my experience—and Birth herself—as a huge multi-faceted crystal. I saw that the different aspects of Zoe’s birth, like facets of a crystal, would not add up to one clear picture but would reflect at many different angles.

 Read more…. A Vision of Birth

“Honoring the Traditional Midwife” was the theme of a midwifery conference presented jointly by the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) of Mexico and Midwifery Today, in Oaxaca, Mexico, from September 24-28, 2003. [See Jan Tritten’s International Midwife editorial on page 46 for more on the conference.] This was a unique and vibrant opportunity to interact and network with practitioners and supporters from many different cultures and social classes. There were large numbers of traditional, indigenous midwives and healers, mostly from Mexico and Guatemala, as well as participants from Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and other locations.

 Read more…. Marion’s Message: From Mexico

The concepts of instinct and intuition have been challenging my mind recently. Two eminent midwives at a conference I attended this year have said that they don’t believe in instinct; instead, they believe that there is a form of inner knowledge that has developed through experience, but is not innate.

 Read more…. The Art Of Leaving Alone

Sixteen hundred births over 31 years without losing a mother or baby—that’s an impressive statistic for any birth practitioner in any country. This was the first thing that Kiyoko Inoue, a Japanese midwife who will celebrate her 80th birthday next year, proudly told me in a recent interview in Japan. She was nervous about talking with me until she realized I speak Japanese and understand midwifery; then she was a fountain of knowledge and stories.

 Read more…. Meet Kiyoko Inoue, Japanese Midwife

I based the title of my article on the title of a highly influential Ladies Home Journal article from the 1950s.    It began in the November, 1957 issue with a letter to the editor from a labor and delivery nurse who gave some examples of abusive treatment of laboring women where she worked. The editors published the letter, saying that they had never heard of such mistreatment, and invited readers to respond. The result was “Cruelty in the Maternity Wards,” an outpouring that Ladies Home Journal published as an article in the May issue the following year.

 Read more…. Cruelty In The Maternity Wards Revisited

Women who choose to include a doula in their birth plans are generally planning a hospital birth. In my doula practice, I frequently hear clients say that they want their birth “to feel like a homebirth” as much as possible in a hospital setting. As I work with these women prenatally I try to learn more specifically what this means to them.

 Read more…. A Doula’s Perspective

When I was a beginning midwife thirty-some years ago, U. S. women were just beginning to recognize that they could make choices in how they gave birth. Their mothers had mostly assumed that they had to do whatever their doctors said with no loved ones nearby, even when that meant submitting to mandatory forceps deliveries, routine pubic shaves, enemas and large episiotomies. Midwives were not available to more than 99 percent of women then, and few women knew that midwives could be a possible option.

 Read more…. Some Thoughts On Unassisted Childbirth

When I see one of my Lotus birth babies gingerly holding her cord, I feel the goodness of leaving them intact. Her cord, his placenta, the baby’s companion in the womb, who has sustained mother and child through pregnancy, has shared the baby’s magical prenatal world.

 Read more…. An Ethnographic Account Of Lotus Birth