Gentle Birth Midwifery - About Your Midwife

I’ve wanted to “catch” babies from as far back as I can remember even before I knew what a midwife was. My first doula experience was for my U.S. Navy barracks roommate in 1997, and from there I was officially hooked. In Greek, doula means “with woman” or “woman caregiver”. A doula is someone who provides emotional and physical support to a woman during the labor and birth process. She provides education to the birthing family before the birth and advocates for the birthing mother and her birth plan in the hospital. I continued educating and moonlighting as a doula while still an air traffic controller in the Navy (until 2003). I was further educated through CAPPA (Childbirth and Postpartum Professional Association) in 2005, and was available through Operation Special Delivery; a program providing free doulas for pregnant military wives of deployed spouses.

After two hospital births of my own and doula work for others, I advanced to assisting home birth midwives in 2005. In addition to the gentle and non-traumatic home births I was witnessing, I was further inspired by the differences between the medical and midwifery models of care. The actual definition of the Midwives Model of Care™ (http://cfmidwifery.org/mmoc/define.aspx) stems from, “the fact that pregnancy and birth are normal life processes,” which is not what most women experience in a one-size-fits-all medically based system. Through repeatedly seeing normal, non-interfered-with birth, I learned to trust the process and to start questioning so many of the birth myths, being able to do away with the commonly asked, “but what if something happens?” It was apparent that the repeated “problems” which many people run into with their hospital births, were actually caused by medical interference of the birthing process. Agreeing to inductions before 42 weeks and continuous fetal monitoring is a major piece of what keeps women ‘tied to their beds’ resulting in “fetal distress” and a 34% c-section rate in the United States. I learned most women won’t give birth on their backs if allowed the freedom to move and to move their babies down naturally. I learned that women don’t grow babies too big for them to deliver vaginally 97% of the time; yes, even the 11+ pounders! If women learned to trust their bodies and not look at pregnancy and birth as something that so many things can go wrong with, we would have a much different situation on our hands. I became empowered with my education and am incredibly passionate on spreading this wealth of knowledge in the quest to do away with what I like to term as “birth fear.” As a result, I went on to have home births with my next two children.

I have provided care to women in Kern, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles counties since 2003 and trained amongst the varying styles of midwives in both California and higher volume birth centers in Florida and Texas. In addition to providing primary care to my own home birth clients, I also assist other midwives with their clients, and am available for the occasional hospital birth as a doula.