Category Archives: Homebirth

The Business of Being Born

By The Midwife | Published: May 8, 2007

Last Friday I was a very lucky duck: I was able to attend a screening of The Business of Being Born at the Tribeca Film Festival, hosted by Friends of the Birth Center, along with a post-show talkbalk with the Abby Epstein, the director of the movie, and Ricki Lake, the producer, followed by a [...]

Also posted in Birth Centers, Birth Education, Hospitals, Labor and Birth, Midwifery, News, Politics, Reviews | 6 Comments

UK midwife responds

By The Midwife | Published: April 27, 2007

My post last week on the UK’s new birth agenda Maternity Matters prompted a UK midwife, Anna Skye, to write the following response on her blog Tales of Midwifery—the Truth. Rather a much-needed reality check, I suppose, to someone (yours truly) whose knowledge of the matter was based only on what she was reading in [...]

Also posted in Choice, Hospitals, Labor and Birth, Midwifery, Miscellaneous, Politics | Leave a comment

UK’s new birth agenda: “Maternity Matters”

By The Midwife | Published: April 17, 2007

So, I didn’t think I’d be doing much blogging over my holiday, but as luck would have it, there’s a big debate about birth occurring in England right now—so big it’s been splashed across the pages of many of the newspapers I’ve been reading, and absolutely impossible to ignore. UK Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, recently [...]

Also posted in Choice, Hospitals, Labor and Birth, Midwifery, Politics | 5 Comments

Pregnant in America

By The Midwife | Published: March 31, 2007

Via The Lactivist and Women’s Health News, there is a new documentary in the works entitled Pregnant in America which explores the medicalization of birth and the creation of the birth industry—the American birth machine—for profit and corporate gain, often at the expense of the health (and sometimes lives) of women and babies in this [...]

Also posted in Hospitals, Labor and Birth, Midwifery | Leave a comment

The news from the NAPW summit

By The Midwife | Published: January 22, 2007

National Advocates for Pregnant Women just concluded its 4 day Summit To Ensure the Health and Humanity of Birthing Women in Atlanta, GA, this past weekend. This summit, one of the first of its kind, was organized by NAPW and NAPW’s director, Lynn Paltrow, to explore the grey area where pregnancy, birth and the law [...]

Also posted in Choice, Feminism, Fertility and Conception, Hospitals, Issues, Labor and Birth, Litigation, Midwifery, Politics, Pregnancy, VBAC | Leave a comment

The Out-of-hospital birth debate continues

By The Midwife | Published: December 3, 2006

A few weeks ago, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released the following policy on out-of-hospital birth: Out of Hospital Births in the United States Labor and delivery is a physiologic process that most women experience without complications. Ongoing surveillance of the mother and fetus is essential because serious intrapartum complications may arise with [...]

Also posted in Birth Centers, Hospitals, Issues, Midwifery, Politics | 5 Comments

Trust birth

By The Midwife | Published: September 11, 2006

Look what happens when you do. This is a birth that could have gone so differently if the midwife involved had acted out of fear instead of trust.

Also posted in Birth Stories, Midwifery | Leave a comment

Midwifery in the news

By The Midwife | Published: August 22, 2006

As we approach the 1 year anniversay or Hurricane Katrina, here’s an interesting article from the Washington Post on the ways that pregnant women, and newborn infants and new mothers have been short changed when it comes to disaster management plans, and how new plans are being made to finally accomodate the needs of pregnant [...]

Also posted in Issues, Midwifery, News | Leave a comment

Vaginal breech homebirth

By The Midwife | Published: June 6, 2006

And then people send me beautiful, delicious birth stories like the following, which was written by my friend Miriam, and I am so grateful that births like this exist! Congratulations on your lovely birth, which would have most likely become an emergency c-section if it had occurred in the hospital (since very few doctors know [...]

Also posted in Birth Stories | 3 Comments

Another way

By The Midwife | Published: June 5, 2006

I’ve been feeling pretty burned out lately. Just mentally and physically exhausted, and feeling very disenchanted with midwifery at the moment. My first year of midwifery school is over, and two things have happened. First, I can’t shake the terrible, in-my-gut feeling that I really don’t know much of anything yet, that everything I learned [...]

Also posted in Hospitals, Midwifery | 16 Comments