Are midwives asked to leave the room?

We are now seeing more midwives educated in a clinical and medical perspective. 

And, we are seeing more pregnant women looking for emotional connection with a doula, birth keeper, or birth companion rather than her midwife. It feels that we have forgotten what is to be with women and what it is to serve women on what is the most transformative moment of a woman’s life. 

Women want emotional, psychological and spiritual connections. They want transparency in their relationship with their caregivers. Right now, it feels that transparency is lacking, that we need to ask for all sorts of tests to trust our pregnant mum-to-be and that Caregivers are showing more trust on a test than the pregnant mother herself, whereas the Woman, is actually the deepest knower, beyond any and all technology of pregnancy and birth itself.

We are telling pregnant women that if she goes over 42 weeks, then you can’t support her homebirth. That if her blood tests are on a certain level then you can’t support her to give birth at home, and this goes on and on. Midwives are directing prenatal care and the outcome of the birth to a certain degree. 

Yes, many high risk women need a midwife. But, a healthy and nourished woman do not. And the reason they look for a midwife is because of reassurance, because they want a Wise Woman next to them. Because we live now in a society that birth is “dangerous” it is treated as a “pathology”. We are disconnected as a society from birth. And we look for a midwife to hold that space of “safety”.

But is it necessarily to have a midwife in the room just if something goes wrong?

Can we have a midwife in the room because we have a soul connection with her? Because we trust her fully? And she trust the birthing mother fully?

Can we, as midwifes, stand by women without the fear of ‘what can happen to me if something goes wrong?’ 

Can we return birth to the family?

I believe in a new paradigm. Where a woman orchestrates her birth and she and her family invites the midwife or birth keeper in.  

Where we are just a witness, her mentor, her support, her anchor. 

We are there to guide her to the wise women of her heart. 

If we stand with her fully on a soul level, she and her baby will invite us to travel to those sacred altered states of consciousness. 

What an honour.

Inspired by the teachings of Whapio - The Matrona