Homebirth is sovereignty and radical self-responsibility. Homebirth is honoring the power and purpose in Birth and rites of passage. Homebirth is aligning with Faith: in the body's wisdom, nature's rhythms, Birth's design, the ferocity of women and tenacity of babies. Homebirth is reveling in the artistry and skill that lies in an ancient lineage, in the hands and spirit of midwives, in practices inclined to protect, optimize and sustain Life.
Why Choose Homebirth
Belief that Birth is designed to work, desire to be in relationship with Birth in its undisturbed physiologic state, trusting in that, and trusting in midwifery care to guard and optimize it.
To birth without medication, intervention, interruption, augmentation, distorted fear, routine one size fits all protocols, time limits, car trips, or beeping machines.
To birth naturally, undisturbed, revered, honored, with sanctity, intimacy, physical and psychic safeguarding.
To make informed, discerning choices about your healthcare and your baby.
To take self-responsibility, to not be ushered though routine anything, to do the work to access the confidence that creates this, to gather the information that bolsters this, to still the noise that detracts from it.
Desire for your home comforts: food, clothes, sheets on the bed, slippers, shower, lighting, and familiar microbiome.
To birth with your people: your partner, friends, family, children, pets. Inviting your people to circle around you in labor intentionally. Considering who you source from, how they hold space, tend, celebrate and love you, and what their voices, guidance and presence offer you.
Desire for intimate relationship, kinship, continuity, and established trust with your birth attendant, your midwife. To know who is going to show up when you call in labor.
To let your instincts lead, to be self directed in your labor; to change positions, move, rest, eat, drink, dance with your labor. To trust your midwife to seamlessly offer guidance when needed, and to continually turn you back to your self and your knowing.
To tend holistically to your body and soul. To receive care that encourages deep inquiry and exploration of Self, that encourages food, supplements, movement, breath, meditation, writing, herbs, homeopathy, and bodywork as medicine.
To curate your birth sanctuary, active readying and adorning the space for the ritual of birth, as if to say, “this matters, this matters to me and this matters to my life”. Removing clutter, cleaning, clearing, considering all the senses with intention: the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, touch and spirit in the Birth room.
Desire for a sacred meeting of your baby and intimate bonding experience, tucked into your own bed. Honoring these golden hours as an essential stage of birth. The undisturbed, sanctified greeting of a baby, of a mother, of a family is one of the less talked about jewels of homebirth.
6-8 weeks holistic mother-baby postpartum care, in your home. To have a midwife come and tend to your body, baby, healing, nursing, learning, integrating as Mother or Mother again.
Homebirth and Safety
What keeps Birth safe is our relationship to it. Birth is not safer because we control it, force it, manage it, medicate it, interrupt it, or fear it.
What keeps birth safe is:
How we relate, revere, honor, invite, allow, witness, listen, prepare for and receive it. And how much space we give it to reveal and to heal.
Physiologic Birth- Birth powered by the innate capacity of women and babies, is as safe as mothers and babies can be in this passage. Birth is inclined to be uncomplicated in the absence of interruption, intervention, distraction, and systemic fear. Midwifery and homebirth are best at honoring and protecting this.
“What if the establishment that purports to be saving women from the spectrum of pain and danger is instead ejecting them from their seat of power.”
The cascade of intervention begins subtly in pregnancy: growing babies in a paradigm of care that often fears birth, continually frames the monitoring of pregnancy around managing it because something might go wrong. This same paradigm holds that doctors, machines and protocols make birth safe and often that pain is pathological.
How does it feel instead to think that most of the time women, babies and Birth get it just right? What if you steeped in that for months before your Birth?
What if you spent time story telling, considering your lineage, your power, what nourishes you most deeply, the parts of you that will inevitably change thru Birth, the parts you are willing to let go and the parts you will fight with all your might to hold onto and share with your babies.
Midwifery restores our deep connection with Self, with our own simple knowings, with Birth, with allowing the body, and women and their wisdom to do the work of growing, birthing, and mothering babies.
Midwives know healthy birth, women, bodies and babies. Midwives resolve, restore, maintain and optimize health. To protect the sanctity of Birth, the midwife must honor limits, create boundaries, be unwavering and steadfast. Continually clarifying her yes and her no. The midwife allows Birth, she says Yes. She also says, No, not now, not in this way. Out of reverence to Birth’s magnitude, the midwife steps in, out of reverence to a woman’s body, heart and soul, she tempers. Out of reverence for Life, she facilitates life-giving interventions. Sometimes Birth does look like that, and she is not less majestic, and either are you.
Birth, undisturbed, revered and guarded is inclined to work. I practice from this place. I also honor deeply, the skills of a midwife and that knowing when to use them is just as vital as knowing what to do. I believe in the safety of undisturbed birth foremost. And I know myself as a midwife who responds with vigilant skill and guidance, without hesitation, because that is also part of the contract- to protect the physical and psychic space of women and babies.
