I had the great fortune to spend two days with her this summer, and her clinic is a truly amazing, open and warm place to be. I witnessed my first out-of-hospital birth there with her, and it was simply wonderful. I will never forget it.

I had no idea she was on YouTube. Thanks for this.

But I also felt deprived as I watched the way the midwife touched and loved these wimmin’s bodies. I think that wimmin who are doulas or who are very present in birthing communities can access that sort of care through friends who are practitioners. But for the rest of us who don’t really “fit”, I think the care we receive, even from midwives who we can encourage to care about us over the nine months, is less of this kind. There’s a barrier. I know I worked really hard to climb over it with my last pregnancy. I was also really struck BAM by the imposed artificial split between midwifery care and doula work caused by the insurgence of the medical establishment. I intuitively understood that midwives had done more, had been more. But when you become a professional, a “professional” finds a niche, becomes part of a union, has people who supervise and watch to make sure they don’t do work that’s “beneath” their new class. What’s left over is passed on to those who aren’t accredited, who aren’t legally able to do the work of a “professional”. Hence the artificial split that cuts many midwives off from the kind of feeling, healing work this woman is seen doing here. And yes, I do understand that there have always been wimmin whose job it was to take care of the post partum mother. But for wimmin who couldn’t afford this kind of service, who were expected to rise from the labour bed and get back to work, the midwife was probably the primary source of loving care followed by wimmin in the family who took care of the new mother post partum, not a stranger who came in primarily to mother the mother. There would have been mothers and aunties and sisters and all that. The more evolved we supposedly become, the more artificial compartments we seem to spawn cutting us off one from the other and turning wimmin’s work done with pride and confidence like this partera’s work, into a shell of its former self. sigh…