Yes! Of course I would love to support you and your family during a home birth, but if you aren’t planning on having a home birth, you can still benefit from midwifery care!

There are various options for during pregnancy. You can choose co-care, which means you get prenatal care from both your midwife and your doctor. Midwives focus on holistic care and living. This means our prenatal visits don’t just include listening to your baby’s heartbeat and measuring your belly, but thorough discussions about how you’re nourishing your body and baby, adding movement to your daily life, how relationships in your life are growing and changing, preventing complications from forming, coming up with solutions for discomforts, and in depth conversations about choices you have about you and your baby’s care (testing, medications, interventions, etc). We can also provide you and your family with extended postpartum support. Instead of the medical model of one 24 hour visit and one 6 week visit, midwives see their clients much more frequently to help with transitions and challenges. If you think you don’t want as much prenatal and postpartum care, but would love support preparing for your birth and during labor, monitrice services are right up your ally! A monitrice supports your family like a doula, but we are also able to incorporate our medical skills during labor to monitor you at home and provide a bigger picture of information for you to decide when it’s time to go to the hospital. In the hospital, we can continue to support you as a doula - offering physical and emotional support for both you and your partner.

If you are not pregnant, you can still use a midwife! We are also trained in well person care. This means we can provide PAP smears, physical exams, and other reproductive care like contraception counseling. We focus on shared decision making and never proceed without your fully informed consent. This is especially beneficial for people who’ve experienced some kind of trauma or feel resistant to have pelvic exams by a doctor. Some midwives even offer these exams in your own home, support you with placing the speculum yourself, walk you through the whole process, and examine at the pace you’re comfortable with.

If you’re interested in learning more about these services or other options that would be best for your family, contact me!

Can I have a midwife if I don’t have a home birth?