Dear Editor:
Re: Are more midwives needed?, The Record, Aug. 1.
Midwives bring pregnancy and birth back to the realm of the sacred/divine feminine – the shared capacity of the female body to carry and birth a child underwrites the relationship which is as much a professional partnership as personal one.
The relationship between two women – one professional, the other client – enriches the experience of the pregnancy and birth and provides better health outcome as one is free to share intimate aches and pains. The naturalistic, holistic approaches advocated by midwives – from acupuncture to doulas to homebirths to drug-free pain relief options – are now being backed by recent medical evidence as beneficial.
The midwifery approach of care, built on partnership, information, choice and close working relationship, worked for me as a single mother with a mental disorder.
Suffering from bipolar disorder, the midwife was there at the hospital facilitating visits with my daughter who was then in foster care. She helped me make choices at a time when I was psychotic and paranoid, and, once discharged, continued the home visits till I was stable and had my daughter back in my care. The other medical team wrote me off as “inaccessible,” but the midwife was the only one I could trust and talk to.
We all know the savings: reduced C-sections, shorter or no hospitals stays, less use of epidurals etc., but let us not miss the intangibles – the interpersonal connections, the empowering affirming experience, the close working partnership forged. In a society that has lost connections, midwives bring back the humanness, the time to discuss things that matter, the hands-on care, the personal, the feminine, wrapped in compassionate professionalism. The government should do everything it can to support midwives – to expand the number of trainees, to increase locum positions so a work-life balance exists, boost benefits so that it can remain a viable profession where being a woman providing care to another woman matters.
F. Aden, Burnaby
