About Me

I do things a little differently.

While medical emergencies and complications may arise during labor, it is essential to recognize that labor is fundamentally a natural process and does not automatically equate to a medical event. Much like how complications and emergencies can occur with the flu, the majority of flu cases do not escalate to a medical event or emergency. I believe that interventions are recommended too quickly and too often. I believe that women are not given the proper informed consent to those interventions to be able to choose for themselves based on their specific situation. I believe, in a lot of cases, that it is insinuated that women are not capable of making their own decisions. I believe that the obstetric model puts women on a conveyor belt of prenatal care that is not tailored to their actual needs. I believe that women should be directing their own care.

OBs make choices for you, but they get to go home at the end of the night while you live with the outcomes of those decisions forever.

Wouldn’t it be better if you, the woman giving birth, were the one to be in control of your own labor?
My goal is to help inform and empower you to take control of your labor and be confident and convicted in your choices.
You don’t have to say no to all interventions, but know why you are saying yes.
Step off the conveyor belt of standard care, you can still walk the same path but let it be a conscious choice rather than simply going along with the flow.

A little more background.

I am a mother of two amazing daughters; their arrivals were so similar, but yet completely different. With my first, I was induced for high blood pressure at 39 weeks. I went into my appointment and left with my OB telling me to head to the hospital. I didn’t have any previous high blood pressure readings, but since I was 39 weeks, the standard procedure was to induce. I cried all the way to the hospital. I was filled with fear. I thought I was going to die. Dramatic, I know, but I jumped to the worst case scenario and nobody explained to me that my case was mild, simply a low-risk instance of gestational hypertension. Yes, things could always progress, but I wasn’t showing signs or symptoms. Many of the things I didn’t want to happen during labor did: having a long labor, getting an epidural, even down to having a male OB attend my delivery (I laugh now because he was one of my favorite OBs I encountered during that birth).

After this first birth, the seed was planted to become a childbirth educator. I loved sharing my experience and the knowledge I gained from that experience because I didn’t want anyone else to go into their labor with that much fear.

Fast forward to the pregnancy of my second daughter and I was determined to do things differently. I was planning a home birth, was in control of my pregnancy and was deciding what my prenatal care and preparation looked like. I had different goals for labor: that it would be Christ centered, that I would laugh though labor, and that I would be the one making decisions about my labor (spoiler: all of this happened). But this time around, my goals were things I had control over - unlike my first pregnant where basically my only goals were to have a short labor and not get an epidural.

Near the end of my pregnancy I chose to transfer care to the hospital because I had preeclampsia. My protein levels were pretty high, but my mindset was different; I was the one who made the decision to walk into the hospital. It was an empowering choice, not something I was being told to do. Again, I was induced at 39 weeks, but this time I had a two hour long conversation with the hospital midwife on the plan for my induction. We talked though all the options and she gave her recommendation, but I was the one who told them when I was ready to start and made the ultimate decision on how the induction was going to start. I would have not felt confident to lead my care in this way if it wasn’t for the knowledge I gained throughout my pregnancy.