Midwife hunting

[Maedze]

In the most non-violent sense, of course

I'm in the Western MA area.  Perhaps this thread needs to be elsewhere?  I'm not sure...the boards have changed a LOT since the last time I did this 

I'm looking for a home-birth midwife, and I have a couple of quirky preferences.  Even if people wanted to message me their private stories, that might help point me in the right direction.   

I prefer my midwife to have a strong respect for evidence based medicine, and I have very little tolerance for the touchy-feely, if that makes sense.   I'm practical, and science oriented.   I have no desire to get in touch with my yoni and my inner womyn via co-opted religious ceremonies and homeopathy         I have a feeling that a midwife who practices that way would likely not like me very much!

This is my fourth pregnancy and I had a successful home birth 5 years ago.   

[jenrose]

I'm nowhere near you, but the two are not mutually exclusive. I've interviewed and known a lot of midwives, and some of them, yeah, I can't work with them because they have the attitude that if I want ANY medical intervention (ultrasound during early pregnancy bleeding, for example) maybe i should just have an OB and hospital birth.

But I've also had three fantastic midwives who while they were perfectly capable of speaking hippie, had, at their heart, the #1 priority of informed choice and consent. My current care is with a certified professional midwife, with co-care through a perinatologist to manage some pregnancy risks (that are not also particularly worrisome about labor). And if I need stats, we work with stats. If I need a common sense approach, she's comfortable with that. She'll tell me if something is out of her skill set, but she's perfectly willing to be the one to talk to the perinatologist for me. 

I think my first midwife, who while now a CPM, at that point was very much a lay midwife with not even a high school diploma, did far more research and thoughtful care for me than the perinatologists I was seeing at the time. 

My second midwife would simply tell me what the standard protocols were, and why, and let me make an informed decision about each. 

In my area, the midwives are used to seeing a huge range, from vegan granola mamas to medical professionals. Mostly, when interviewing, you just put forward your style, and see how they react. Last time, I wanted VERY hands off, and did not hire any of the midwives who responded to that by telling me dead baby stories. 

 

[Psmythe]

OP--we felt the same way about choosing birth classes.  We wanted to try out hypnosis for birthing, but we made a pact that if there were any crystals in sight or any other mystical bs we were out of there!  Our hypnotherapist was very professional!  We have met a handful of hypnotherapists who seemed very religious or weirdly corporate.  Some who talked about working with your inner [insert archetype here] and were very formulaic.  Finding a normal(ish) woman who believed that helping women with self meditation and guided relaxation in order to be successful in birth was great!  She tailored some of our exercises to fit us, since repeating the phrase "I am safe" did not in fact make me feel safe.  It didn't occur to me to feel unsafe until presented with that phrase!  We had a great birth and I'm glad we had support people that adjusted to our style instead of trying to hunt for a perfect match that may not exist.
 

Originally Posted by jenrose 

In my area, the midwives are used to seeing a huge range, from vegan granola mamas to medical professionals. Mostly, when interviewing, you just put forward your style, and see how they react. Last time, I wanted VERY hands off, and did not hire any of the midwives who responded to that by telling me dead baby stories. 

 

Yikes!  That's intense. 

[jenrose]

It was especially inappropriate since I had JUST had a miscarriage. Hello, I know things can go wrong. I'm not an idiot, and telling me about how your baby would have died if your midwife hadn't been right there when I'm talking hiring someone as backup for a UC... NOT cool. The really aggravating thing was that I'd told them over the phone when we first talked, "If you're not comfortable being backup for a UC, I don't want to waste your time or mine."

And BOTH midwives (one had actually been the midwife for the other) told me the SAME story about the one midwife having shoulder dystocia with her baby, in order to "persuade" me that they "needed" to be there.

Another midwife told me about a UC couple who'd called her after three days of labor and the baby'd died. Yeah, that's just exactly what I needed to her. But she was totally okay with UC, but couldn't understand how I could want a hands-off birth on the one hand, and yet still want to go in for an ultrasound when bleeding in the first tri was giving me panic attacks and flashbacks to my miscarriage. 

The person I ended up hiring (and who I did end up asking to be there at the birth) just said, "I trust your judgment and I know that if you need help you'll call." I can't trust a midwife who doesn't trust or respect me in turn, because if they can't listen and hear what I"m actually saying in an interview, how the heck can I trust them to listen to me and hear what I'm saying when I'm in labor?

But yeah, the best midwives I've seen weren't so caught up in the touchy-feely woo-woo side of things that they couldn't meet a mama on her own turf. I don't need someone to tell me how to get in touch with my chakras, I need someone who can be a second opinion if I start losing the thread. I didn't need my midwife to get me in touch with my inner goddess, I needed her to reassure me that baby was tolerating labor well, to stop me from second guessing myself when what I was feeling didn't make sense. (Turns out, no, I was feeling what I was feeling, my baby just didn't make sense due to some funky skull bone issues.)

My current midwife is a peach to work with. If I ask her about the current research, she's either got it or will find it out. She'll tell me what her standard practices are, but doesn't freak if I decline certain parts of them. If I was planning for a UC this time, she actually has a contract for UC backup. She really seems to get that my goal is to start out with the least intervention we can manage and still keep things safe, and only add in interventions if they are necessary. And she doesn't argue with me if I have an area of expertise that is beyond what she knows. For me, I don't want to hand responsibility over to someone else, I want people on my team. And she's great with that.