Sunday, October 13, 2013

Call of the Midwife

A Midwife is someone who provides a service to women, families, and their community.
She is a confidant, educator, healer, counselor, activist, so many traits that describe her nobility.
A Midwife provides personable holistic prenatal care to an expecting woman.
What does personable holistic care mean?
Personable means you can relate to this person. She is among your particular demographic or can relate to your demographic, whether it be race, social status, economic status, etc. Confiding in her is a breeze.
Holistic means she approaches birth as a natural occurrence and treats it as such. Birth will happen whether a woman pushes her baby out or not. The Midwife is there to observe and look out for any complications that may arise. Birth is a natural event that SOMETIMES needs medical assistance. It is not an event that needs medical assistance from the start, unless there were prior complications before pregnancy or created during pregnancy.
Therefore, a Midwife is someone who can relate to you personally that provides a natural option to birth.
Midwives are proactive; meaning they are there to ensure the mother is maintaining great health, positive mental attitude, and keeping active, that will all lead to a healthy pregnancy, well labored birth, and healthy baby.

Midwives have existed for hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of years.
In recent years, the last 500, they were ousted as witches or evil meddlers of magic, all because they were so revered and known as spiritual healers.
Midwives were placed on such a pedestal this made men's (European men) ego flare with rage. Why should this person receive such accolades?
And with the onset of hospitals, which began as places for the ill and old to go to die, people were given no other choice but to have their babies in hospitals.
Why bring a new human being into a setting of disease?
There is money to be made in birth and with Midwives taking a holistic approach this does not make much money.
The medical industry needs you so they can charge you for your hospital stay, drugs, and anything else in the hospital setting.
It was and is seen as the only option.

Homebirths are much older than hospital births and if this is how we gave birth with that spiritual healer, mother, Midwife, why not go back to tradition.
The maternal & infant mortality rates aren't getting better, especially among the black community.
So, why not go back to a method that obviously worked before the medicalization of birth.

I am currently a Student Midwife, continuing my birth work journey of helping my community realize the importance of natural birthing.
Natural birthing brings the family closer and creates a spiritual bond that lasts until our time comes to return to the source. It creates the peace of mind, body, and soul that is so needed within our society.
Midwives assist in creating this space of peace.
Do you know any Midwives? Look up a Midwife in your area, get to know her and what drives her to do the work she does.
I have heard the call and answer to be a spiritual healer, the great Midwife.


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