r/Midwives

I hope it’s ok to post here.

My sister in law is a midwife. She is predominantly a home birth midwife and very against any medical intervention for birthing.

My first pregnancy, 7 years ago, ended in an induction for hypertension. Unfortunately due to my baby being posterior/asynclitic/brow presentation/double nuchal cord, I didn’t dilate and my baby’s heart rate decelerated. He was born via emergency c section. My second, I had a scheduled c section due to a cesarean scar defect. And my third, well I just followed suit with the first two. My babies are here and healthy and while I would have loved to avoid surgery, it is what it is.

Every time I see my sister in law she makes a horrib

I am an MD with training in pathology, as well as extra fellowship training in perinatal pathology. I look at hundreds of placentas every year and perform dozens of autopsies, mostly from stillbirths and neonatal deaths.

My speciality is a bit frustrating because obviously I can only give you a diagnosis after the fact (when something has gone wrong), although I do try to comment on things that can recur in future pregnancies. I also feel like the whole field of stillbirth prediction and prevention is still in its dark ages and we lose too many babies that I wish could be saved.

I work in Canada but trained in the US. I am not super familiar with all the different “flavours” of midwife y

This one is for the midwives, but can also serve as a PSA to clients in the sub.

Midwives, I usually try to make myself available to clients in the 18 months after birth for advice and help with random things like weaning and teething. I’m a self-employed homebirth midwife so I don’t have the same clinical distance that some of you have from your clients/patients.

One of my former clients got pregnant again 5 months postpartum because she didn’t follow any of my advice for birth control or any of my advice for using fertility awareness method postpartum (pacifiers and bottles).

She reached out to me in a panic when she found out she was pregnant, and I talked her down over several day

There have recently been some comments about labour and delivery only being understood by "people with uteruses", or women, or those who have been through it themselves. Specifically in the context of wondering if men can be midwives. I've also heard someone say that having children is the "highest calling" a woman can aspire to, by a person who couldn't understand why a trans man would want to "give that up"... don't even get me started on the assumptions needed to unpack that sentiment. And yes, they said that out loud, to a room full of midwifery students. To be fair, it was a question of naivete more than malintent, but it was still incredibly tone deaf.

It almost seems like this is a

How do you talk to clients who put themselves and/or their baby at risk?

I’m in a few pregnancy/birth/postpartum related groups since I’m interested in potentially having a home-birth with a midwife next time around, and I am trying to learn about what that looks like.

Anyway I notice that in the more “natural minded” groups , laypeople often promote dangerous ideas they come up with at the drop of a hat or with absolutely no thought into it, just an automatic reflex that is to be in opposition to everything outside of their little mom groups.

Last week in one group, a woman posted about how she’d been called that the heel prick results had come in and her newborn may have galactosemia.

It needs to be known that there is an unlicensed “midwife” based out of Wisconsin named Heather Baker who has been traveling to Nayarit, Mexico for years now and has assisted in dozens of births under the false pretext of providing an all-natural experience for unsuspecting mothers.

This woman is an extremely dangerous con artist who has written at least four books on home birth and free birth (all available on Amazon) and presents herself as a licensed authority on the subject. She was banned by the state of WI to practice midwifery at all. Her M.O. is that she convinces people to buy her round trip plane tickets from Wisconsin to Mexico, be put up in an Airbnb, given spending money, and c

Read a post about mistreatment by midwives and thought I’d share my story.

I was 19 when I fell pregnant. I’m in the UK, and was living in Glasgow for the first 2 months of my pregnancy before I moved home to Ireland. Just for background info.

I knew choosing to carry the pregnancy through would bring people judging me for age, but I’m a pretty strong person so didn’t care. Until my first prenatal appointment when I got back home.

I was called in, after finding out that my baby would most likely have Von Willebrands type 2 especially if it was male) turns out he does and is) and was told that if I chose natural birth that no forceps nor vacuum would be available to me due to risk of brui

Hey everyone, I need your help proving a point to my boyfriend. I was telling him about cryptic pregnancies and he firmly believes that it's fake. I've shown him videos, googled information on it and he still doesn't believe me. It someone can prove him wrong and explain how a cryptic pregnancy works that would be amazing.

I am the patient of a midwife. I had a very strange thing happen at my appointment yesterday, and I wanted to ask here how common this is (just as something to hold me over while I wait in suspense for an ultrasound in the lab).

I am 14 weeks pregnant. My midwife looked at the baby, measured everything, and then said everything looked good. Then she started moving the wand back and forth between two black spaces-one with the baby she had just been looking at, and other space with what we both saw that appeared to be something like ribs, with rhythmic beating, and some movement in the other black space. She was really looking at that intently, with disbelief- so I asked her if that was anot

Hi all! I just wanted to share how im feeling in the hopes somebody could give me some insight into if this behaviour is normal or not. The midwife i had when i was pregnant with my first was very judgemental towards me. I am not a small lady, but not a big lady either. My BMI sits at 30.5 and although that is not ideal i am hardly obese. I understand the risks of being overweight while pregnant but i have struggled with my weight all my life. I stayed active and ate well during the whole pregnancy but every visit to the clinic this midwife would always look me up and down, weigh me and click her tongue making comments like “you are really putting your baby at risk. This is foolishness.” I t

Hospital based midwife. Need to vent on a birth overnight.

Woman brought in my ambulance to birth suite. Unknown gestation, no care in pregnancy. Baby number 8, she thinks she’s about 30 weeks.

A quick search on the system shows she’s known to child services. No kids in her care, all removed and in foster care.

CTG shows almost no variability and unprovoked decels. No contractions. She says all her other babies have been born by caesarean. She only came in because she had a bleed at home.

Consented and prepped for theatre. Baby born flat and needed a full resus, stabilised then transferred to NICU.

Just as the lady was put under (did not consent for a spinal, wanted GA), the obstetricia

Today I caught my first baby and attended my first birth alone as I was closest to Mom and she went very quickly!

I will definitely always remember that moment and Baby/Momma❤️

Baby was born completely en caul and man those bags are TOUGH! 😂

Hey midwife’s (and mums) of reddit!

I just wanted to get your views on this before i committed to a bizillion more years of study.

I am a male and I am really considering studying to become a registered nurse and become a midwife.

There is a couple of reasons why I want to go down this pathway,

The first is that I think the birth of my kids where the most amazing moments of my life and whilst I know it isn’t just the good parts and that birthing stillborns are a part of midwifery I feel like supporting mums giving birth would just be a super humbling experience and doing it for a living would be super rad.

The second part of this is that eventually I want to move into maternal ch

We had to terminate for medical reasons at 21 weeks and for whatever reason I was only offered induction, labour and delivery. Every single midwife involved with our care was amazing. Due to being high risk, we had a specialist midwife who looked after me from twelve weeks up until induction, and then the birth unit midwives took over. She helped us through a very difficult time (receiving further bad news at the 20 week scan), gave us all the information we needed to assist in making our decision without ever pushing us one way or the other, provided such amazing support and was never too busy to take a phone call or text with questions. Just amazing.

Because the induction took a while