Know that you are a midwife. Know that this is just one step on a path that began when you started serving women. No more, no less. Be who you are and go on to become the midwife you are meant to be. Never let someone else define you. Not by tests, by paper, by […]
Fitness
Pregnancy, fit bit style..“I get a thousand steps just walking to and from restrooms” -EM
Change
t Cesarean Awareness Month.Increased cesareans affect us all. Every man woman and child. The effects for babies are lifelong. When 1/3 of mothers celebrate mothers day in a week, it will be with lifelong scars, lifelong stories.Be the change. -Shannon Mitchell
Birth Becomes Real
If I make this real, it will expand and take up all the oxygen, like a fire that cannot be put out. -Shannon Mitchell
Perceptions
Your perception of risk should not determine another mother’s right to autonomy. Stop pretending that you are playing “devils advocate” and accept that sometimes, other people will make decisions you would not make and that your bias should not affect their right to do so. Shannon Mitchell
Politics of Compromise
Mothers need to know that their care and their choices won’t be compromised by birth politics. -Marsden Wagner
Marketing Cesareans
May 2, 2014 at 6:24 PM · If your hospital posts pictures for marketing their ability to do cesareans, one has to wonder why they don’t post photos of their natural, vaginal, supported births without medications. After all, truly supported, healthy birth would be the real marketing strategy since it’s so rare in hospital birth. One-third […]
Actions Produce Outcomes
We simply cannot separate birth outcomes from what we do to women in labor and birth. To do so is intellectual dishonesty. Birth has variable outcomes but when we interfere, change, alter, add to, mess with, give drugs, force induction, break water, *we* have altered an outcome and there is no longer a “this would […]
Convenience
— as soon as she said it in lecture, I had to write it down: “Midwifery is not a convenience profession.” -Patricia Edmonds, Oregon midwife
Healing Art of Listening
Listening is noting what, when and how something is being said. Listening is distinguishing what is not being said from what is silence. Listening is not acting like you’re in a hurry, even if you are. Listening is eye contact, a hand placed gently upon an arm. Sometimes, listening is taking careful notes in the […]