World Needs Home Birth Midwives Now More Than Ever

The World Needs Home Birth Midwives Now More Than Ever!

Home Birth Aotearoa media release 4 May 2010

In New Zealand we are fortunate that we can choose to birth where we feel the most comfortable and safe, where our hearts tell us our babies should be born. The research may support what our hearts tell us but we don't need that when we feel empowered to believe in our own knowing, when we know that we have our midwives behind us always supporting us in our power to be mothers. As women we honour our midwives not as proscribed modern-day health professionals but as our time-honoured partners who journey with us, sharing important secrets of life and death and a belief in our power and courage as birthing women.

When we are free to choose our place of birth and free to choose only the people we are truly connected to, to participate in our unique birthing experience, we are expressing our humanity and a way of being as authentic and safe as life gets.

The International Day of the Midwife is an occasion for every individual midwife to think about the many others in the profession, to make new contacts within and outside midwifery, and to widen the knowledge of what midwives do for the world. The International Confederation of Midwives’ overarching theme “The World Needs Midwives Today More Than Ever” is part of an ongoing campaign to highlight the need for midwives all over the world and Home Birth Aotearoa acknowledges the struggle that women around the world face everyday to achieve the quality of midwifery service that we in New Zealand enjoy.

Throughout the history of the world, a midwife, either formally or experientially educated, has been the most common type of birth attendant. In days past and even today in some increasingly rare communities, a midwife was generally an older woman in the community respected as a ‘wise woman’ and birth was a normal life event without unrealistic medical hype distorting the simplicity of birth with fear and stress.

Our modern world has created a momentum that prevents us developing intimacy with each other – so much to do, the pressure to conform to societal expectations, the competitive pressure to achieve and to always ‘look the part’. Becoming a parent renders all of that unimportant as we experience the most fundamental of all human processes – growing, birthing and nurturing a baby. For most of us creating new life is a time of immense personal transformation, for men and women, midwives and families.

We learn that it is our deep and real connections that can transform former superficial cultural beliefs, and lift us to be more than we ever imagined possible. That it is how we connect with each other that changes our world. The real relationships we build with our loved ones as we create families, the partnership we build with our midwives as we grow and birth our babies, the friendships we enjoy with our like minded friends as we grow as parents, these blessings create the depth of connection and intimacy we all crave and need to be authentic people.

Home Birth Aotearoa honours the midwives who walk out on the branches of the tree of life behind us, always with us and empowering the midwife and mother within us all. Women are midwives are women and we know the unknown.
Therefore the midwife acts without doing anything

And teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

Things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn't possess,

Acts but doesn't expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

This is why it lasts forever.

paraphrased from the Tao Te Ching

ENDS

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