#290 | Another Off-The-Record Birth Rant with Midwife Lindsey Meehleis

You may remember midwife Lindsey Meehleis from episode #187 in our first off-the-record-style conversation. When we decide to interview Lindsay, we do so without a plan, knowing that whatever is on our minds will be a worthwhile and impactful conversation. In today's conversation, we chat about the problems with modern medicine, how midwifery has evolved over the years, what breech babies can teach us about our emotions, how Lindsey handles pregnancies that go beyond forty-two weeks, how to get your partner or family members on board with choosing home birth the first time, and we even dabbled a bit in the current political climate. Imagine you are sitting at the table next to us at a cafe, eavesdropping on our shop talk, and that's today's episode. Enjoy!

Lindsey Meehleis

#187 | Carrying the Torch of the Midwives Before Us: An Off-The-Record Kind of Conversation with Home Birth Midwife Lindsey Meehleis

The Business of Being Born

Why Not at Home

**********
Our sponsors:
Silverette Nursing Cups -- Soothe and heal sore nipples with 925 silver nursing cups.
Postpartum Soothe -- Herbs and padsicles to heal and comfort.
Needed -- Our favorite nutritional products for before, during, and after pregnancy.
Use promo code: DOWNTOBIRTH for all sponsors.
DrinkLMNT -- Purchase LMNT with this unique link and receive a free 8-day supply. 

Connect with us on Patreon for our exclusive content.
Email Contact@DownToBirthShow.com
Instagram @downtobirthshow
Call us at 802-GET-DOWN

Work with Cynthia:
203-952-7299
HypnoBirthingCT.com

Work with Trisha:
734-649-6294

Please remember we don’t provide medical advice. Speak to your licensed medical provider for all your healthcare matters.

Transcript

I really like to say that there is the cervical dilation, but there's also this vaginal dilation. We have a vaginal sphincter, and so if we're rigid and tight and we're, you know, all caught up in ourselves, like that's not going to happen, it's not going to happen. And I really try to like and have a man understand this is, I talk about orgasm like, could you go into a place that you hated and there was 10 people looking at you with bright lights, telling you to perform, telling you like screaming at you, would you be able to have an orgasm, right?

And climbing you, by the way, you've got, you've got 12 more minutes, holding your legs back, yeah, like managing your body position.

I make analogies to sex all the time in my class. That's the same thing, same thing. You have to feel safe. Never have sex in these places. So why are we thinking that it's okay and acceptable for a woman to be placed in these situations to birth.

I'm Cynthia Overgard, owner of HypnoBirthing of Connecticut, childbirth advocate and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Podcast. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

You may recall our conversation with traditional midwife Lindsey mailis from episode 187 one of our favorite episodes of 2022 if you haven't heard it yet, called carrying the torch of the midwives before us. And if you haven't seen Lindsay's Instagram page, go follow it, because the birth videos are truly unbelievable, beautiful, beautiful videos. For some reason, as soon as we ever seen Lindsay, we always immediately start chatting. So we never officially started this episode. You'll see, just like last time, our conversation had an Off The Record vibe where we discuss many topics around the changing industry and society around us. Enjoy and I and when you look at it from the lens that I typically look at things, which is the majority of how I practice Midwifery, is through the foundations of Appa. And I know I talked about this before, many times on podcast, but app is the association of pre and Perinatal psychology and health. And like, there's heavy hitters on there, like Bruce Lipton, you know, like, there's really amazing people that are on this board, and it talks about the implications of the that first primal imprint. And so, like, you know, if we correlate that to the first primal imprint of life, like, what does that mean later on? There's no long term studies. There's nothing. And so we can't make the assumption, because nobody cares. And that's how our whole medical system works in this country, if, if one doctor fixes one problem for you, they don't care what it does downstream, and they don't care what doctor you'll have to go to next after them, yeah, because they don't even talk. This is not me giving this is not me opining on how they actually feel emotionally toward you. This is how the system works. They only see their little myopic scope of what they have to fix. They stamp it like done, go, move on. Yeah. And that's it. That's Yeah, as long as it works in the moment, who cares what the consequences are down the road? Because that's somebody else's problem in their eyes. And that's the downside of not having a integrated, holistic, comprehensive type of health care. And that's one of the reasons midwifery is so great, because it does provide that continuity of care. But for, for, in my opinion, if the way that I practice, it's from, it's from womb to tomb, like, like I, you know, my, some of my midwifery babies are, you know, 1617, some of them are like, not Midwifery, but births I've attended. They're 19 years old and and I still see these, these kids. I still see I call them my babies, but I still see these, these humans that, you know, go from a baby and move through adolescence and move through the teenage years, and then, you know, seeing what happens within the fight family dynamics, and what their parents are thinking and how they contact me for advice through different things throughout each of those stages. And I feel like that's completely missing from all aspects of medicine, like we don't have that. Maybe the family physician, maybe, but that's that's a dying breed in itself. You know, I actually sat at a homecoming dinner with all the parents of the kids that went to homecoming, and I sat across from this guy, and he was like, Yeah, I'm a doctor. And I was like, Oh, cool. What kind of medicine are you? And he's like, I'm a family practice doc. And I was like, you still exist. I didn't, I didn't know there was a place for you anymore. And I said to him, I said, you know, throughout all of time, I feel like midwives were the original family physician, and that's what was modeled. You know that the care. That was given within the the medicine woman within the community, is what family physicians were modeled after. And that's just like, it's, it's, it's, it's leaving right now, because everything is a specialized medicine, and we're not connecting the dots. Nobody's talking to anybody. There's no integration with anything. And it's, it's kind of mind blowing. I think people don't even understand what holistic means, because it's taken on this definition of just meaning crunchy or natural. But I think that everyone just needs to think about the whole purpose of holistic is looking at the whole person. It doesn't make sense because we don't have the W in the word holistic, so there's a disconnect psychologically with the spelling, but holistic means you look at the whole person, not just the whole body in every realm of medicine, but the emotional person, the mental person, what's going on in their life and their environment, energetically, all of it. That's holistic. Your relationships dramatically affect your life and your health. Everything does, and I think that just has gotten lost, and no one really understands what holistic means. Gosh, that could be a campaign for us, couldn't it? We changed the spelling of that word so people, yeah, I've seen it spelled that way in various places, with a w. I mean, there is an increase in, you know, the functional medicine realm, like, there's, for sure, a lot of people being like, Hey, what is that? Oh, that sounds really good. That makes sense, which is really, truly the on, you know, the functioning of how one part of the body impacts the other part of the body. But as far as in maternity and birth and babies, I mean, I was in the NICU yesterday, for example, and for lactation, for a lactation visit, which I am not in the hospital very much, but the mother was passing her breast milk off to the nurse to save, to feed the baby later, and the nurse couldn't touch it. She had to be gloved. She put the breast milk in biohazard bags. I'm like, What is this message? Like, the healthiest thing? What is going on here? You're putting her breast milk in individual biohazard bags and she can have no contact with it. Wow. Wow. Look, where is the disconnect here?

Yeah, I'm sure the medication that's in an IV drip going to the baby isn't labeled A biohazardous bag, and God only knows what the implications of those medications are. And of course, I'm making an assumption, because I don't even know what's wrong with the baby, but you know, it's, it's, it's like, you just look at these situations, and you're like, what? Where's the disconnect here people, but it almost feels robotic, in a sense, like, you know, like, here's the bag. Like, move it to the biohazard bag. Move it to, yeah, in the refrigerator. No, obviously the biohazard bag isn't going to harm the breast milk, but it's the mental the message, the message, it's the mental imprint. It's the concept of how we're like, seeing this whole picture. This baby was 36 weeks gestation, doing beautifully. Really didn't even need to be in the NICU. But that's a whole nother comment. There they say. But meanwhile, Americans are filling their tanks at the pump with no gloves. It's exactly, it's actual hazardous material. It's sloppy. It leaks. It can get on the hands. The hands can smell it. Everything is cultural. Everything is cultural. It's like no one even thinks twice about that, which is actually a hazard to oneself and anyone else around them. But this, who do we convince and what has to happen in the mind to perceive it that way, to be to be packaging it that way and sealing it away. She's wearing a hazmat suit handling breast milk. We could even put that implication towards our food. I mean, if you look at some of these, like green fluorescent talkies or something that, you know, unfortunately, having a teenager, you see these things come through your house, and it's, what is it? Oh, yeah, those, you know, like Doritos, the spicy chips in a bag, all the all the dyes and all the horrible chemicals. And it's like that that should actually have a biohazard label on it, because that's more harmful than you know either, and they're eating it, they're literally just putting it straight into their bodies. So Lindsay, you said that home birth midwifery has changed through these years that you've been doing this work. What changes have you seen in the past year or two? Because you said the changes are accelerating, basically, aren't they? Well, there's just more people that are interested in home birth, right? So they're the people that we usually look at. If you look at the studies of who's choosing home birth, it's usually highly educated, usually higher income families that are choosing this. And so what I'm finding is that there's, there's a little bit more of a bridge that's being formed. I feel like I had a transfer earlier this year in February, and it was a mom who had a really precipitous birth, like I'm talking 25 minutes from her water breaking, and I was actually running my dog on a beach trail. And I, you know, obviously, when they said that she was contracting, I turned around and started heading back. And then we realized. How fast it was going. And I nobody. It was physically impossible for anybody to make it. And as we, you know, ran in through the front doors, the dad had forgotten to turn off the tub, so the water was I was actually coming through the second floor down to the first floor, and we walked upstairs, and I was like, two, well, three, really, if you want to include dad, it was like three deers and a headlight, and you had a shocked and stunned dad, and you had a shocked and stunned mom, and you had a shocked and stunned baby. And and what we always find in those situations is that when mom regulates, baby usually regulates. So a baby was stable, and so I was really, you know, we turned the water off, and we threw a bunch of towels down, and we, you know, got them out of the overflowing tub to the bed, and we really tried to, like, bring Mom back into our body, because I'm sure she feel like, felt like she just got hit by a freight train, and we, we grounded her back. And I always use leg massage postpartum. That's kind of one of my favorite things. I feel like that's, I hear feedback all the time that it's usually mom's favorite thing about birth is that postpartum leg massage, because they're not even paying attention to us, but they are getting that oxytocin release from the leg massage, and they're sinking back into their bodies, and they're with their babies, and it's, they're, you know, everything feels good. And so we were doing that, and after about two hours, I just realized again, baby was stable the whole time, but she just wasn't regulating, and she she was having lots of transient tachypnea, and she wasn't nursing, and I realized we needed to activate EMS and transfer her into the hospital, and so we transferred her in the hospital. And about six months prior, I had done a in service for the Fire Authority where I live, and every single firefighter and paramedic had to sit and watch an hour long video of me talking about the midwifery scope of care, the practice of what we do, what our training is, what our implications are of things we can do at home. Really making a comparison, it would be like showing up to someone having a heart attack with a cardiologist on board. The only thing we're really looking for is a transfer to the hospital, to a place where we need a higher level of care. And so, you know, EMS walked in and they're like, Oh, we recognize you, because it was fresh in their mind of just watching this training video, and it was the most seamless transfer I've ever had. I got to the NICU, and here's this neonatologist that's like, oh, this could happen anywhere. This. This didn't. This didn't happen because you had a home birth. And again, I stepped into this place where I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm part of the team here. You know, I'm not, I'm not getting criticized for doing these out of hospital births, which is against their system. You really have to think that these people aren't really against you. They're looking at you like you're against their system, and so we transferred Baby. Baby needed a little bit more respiratory support, and we transferred baby to the NICU. And in the whole time, we had this amazing neonatologist that was just so supportive of the parents wanting to make sure that every one of their needs was met. He actually went on to do a podcast with me and Dr Stu a couple months ago, and he talked about his implications of seeing how different that you know, medicine has changed throughout the year start his training, and how he can incorporate bridging gaps between parents from a holistic standpoint, with with the letter W to to a NICU practice, where there's lots of people telling you different things, and lots of people that have different opinions. And so, you know those examples right there? Like, I can never even imagine that happening 1015 years ago. Like that would that I've experienced it 1015 years ago, and it was, it was like walking into a fire. And so I'm hopeful, and I hope it's not just this isolated place in Orange County, where I'm actually trying to reach out to different agencies and provide education and really make the professional, you know, nuance between professions, I should say there, but I feel like I really hope it's echoing throughout the United States. And if there's one thing that COVID did, I feel like there's a lot of people within the medical system that are starting to distrust the medical system that they're that they're in, and seek different options as well. So if we have both of those things working to our advantage, I feel like midwifery is going to continue to shift and change a lot, which will be better for our clients. Most of the best trends usually start in California and then spread across the country. So that's and many of the worst I will add, yes, some of the worst. We cannot deny that in the past 10 years. No, I agree. True. True, true. There are some bad ones, but a lot of good ones too. But yeah, that's interesting, because typically, it's been the opposite. The people in healthcare are usually the ones that are the most, opposed to the out of hospital birth. Or it was interesting that you said, because they're coming and seeing all these home births, they're actually opening their eyes up to the goodness in it and the safety in it, instead of the opposite, which is usually like the nurse or the EMS professional saying, oh my god, I would never. Because this is what I see day in and day out. But the reality is, it's just a perspective change that neonatologist was so spot on, like, yes, of course, tachypnea of the of the newborn can happen in the hospital or at home. And the the thing is, the difference is that that baby probably recovered faster because the baby was born at home, because there was less separation between the mom and the baby, because you kept them together, because you kept the placenta and the cord, you know, attached, whereas, yes, the same thing can happen in the hospital, and the situation is worse, therefore making everybody think, Oh, my God, thank God, this didn't happen at home, but it's worse because of the interventions of the hospital. I mean, it's so funny, because we're always saying everybody is questioning whether home birth is safe, and the real question is, is hospital birth safe? Yeah, nobody's asking that question. Nobody's asking that question because it's behind closed doors, you know, and so and so, we're not really, actually looking statistically at the the data of of for many different things, like the safety, but also like, what, what is mom's experience of birth, you know? Like, that's such an important piece to look at as well. Like, is she satisfied with her birth experience? I can't tell you how many times I have people come into my office and sit down and say, you know, I had the most traumatic experience of my life, you know, or, like, even with a newborn, like they're coming in, they're like a sister of one of my clients or somebody, and they're like, need to come in and actually process what just happened to them. Yeah, I published an article many years ago called Better birthing. It's about time in which I shared a lot of research on the harm of timing a woman's labor and telling her she's out of time. And after providing all this research and information, I made a point to say, this is not about vaginal birthing for the joy and gratification of it, though, that should not be discounted. Yeah, of course, vaginal birth is statistically safer, but it has to be acknowledged, like, how can we go about this, as though that's not even a factor? Yeah, at all. And what you're saying about, like, Trisha was saying too, like we're not questioning about the safety of hospital birth, because it's presumed we do the same thing in every facet of research in this industry, we we look at, what if we induce 10,000 women with pertussin, how many stillbirths do we prevent? Boom, there's your number. They never look at, okay, what happens when you give 10,000 women Pitocin versus 10,000 women who didn't receive Pitocin for induction? How much safer is that scenario? They don't dare look at that, because it's going to show all the harms and side effects and risks of Pitocin. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's a default of our system, for sure, because it's across the board. It's not just within the birth setting, you know, it's, it's just how we look at everything. And so that's where we get all of this differing opinion, and most of it is so biased towards a system that is a monster. It's, it's, and I'm not saying that in a bad way. I'm saying it like, in a visual way, like the Western, Western medical system is a huge profiting, you know, Beast. It's, we have so much of, I call it the medical mafia, where we look at you can't question it. If you question it, you get shut down. Like, you know, there's, there's so many friends I have that are doctors that have done such amazing things with their medical licenses, and the second they question the status quo, they're blacklisted.

Let me ask you a question. So I think what confuses and concerns me the most, and it has for many years is the divergence. The home birth community is increasing. Cesarean rates keep going up, intervention rates going up, and yet there is also a growing community of women having physiologic birth or pursuing that and getting informed there's just this massive divergence. It's not that one trend is necessarily increasing, because they're both increasing, and I can't make sense of it. It's confusing to me. I don't know what how it's all going to come to a head. It's almost like where we are politically. This isn't normal. Any young, expecting couple right now probably thinks politics has always been divided. It's never been remotely as divided as it is now. It's not in our lifetimes. No, not in our lifetime. We always, oh, well, you know, it often felt like a lesser of two evils, or we had to, but this is like the country is terrified time and time again about who's about to become president, and this episode is probably going to come out after the election. But I think what scares me and freaks me out is the divergence. Yeah, like the people who are informed are so much more informed than we've ever been, and yet, it's not moving the needle and the medical side of things, it's not making things better. Over there, our mortality rates still increase. What's your perspective on that? Like, can you explain it or make sense of it? Because I've never been able to.

No, I don't think I can either. You know, it's you. Politics aside, but I'm going to bring up a politician. I'm so grateful that Bobby Kennedy has been talking about this so much because he's actually shedding light to it. And I don't know if you've ever heard him like really speak before. I know there's so many different little sizzles of him speaking out there, but actually sit like and talk to him in a sense, where this man is one of the smartest humans I've ever listened to in my whole entire life. That his ability to remember statistics and dates and, you know, like his passion for for what happens within the the family, the United States family, the children of the United States. It's so apparent that this is actually his life's work. This is his legacy that he's going to leave here, and I'm so grateful that it's been actually in the public. You know, I know that the mainstream has tried to ostracize him and make him look like a lunatic, and they've done a good job in the mainstream. But if you you know, if you listen to this man, the statistics that he has is we're failing right now, like we are, we are desperately failing our children. We're desperately failing our adolescents. Like we have the highest rate of children on any sort of medication, including mental you know, psychedelic, not psychedelic psychiatric medication. And it's, it's like, let's have more of these conversations. And it's like, no, this isn't political, like it's a human issue. It's a human issue. And so I think I don't have an answer. I wish I had an answer. If I had an answer, I'd be saving the world's problems in my mind. You know, it doesn't even make sense to me. Trisha, do you think anything about that?

I mean, I kind of think that that's typically how it goes when there's resistance from one side to the other side. I mean, the mainstream birth culture doesn't want midwifery there no forever, so as midwives grow, they're going to dig their heels in more.

Yeah, and that's something that is still very much apparent right now, because I remember when I started birth work, there was a little local hospital here, and the midwives had surpassed what the OBS were doing, and they got kicked out. Like it, like threat. We literally went to like, the city hall and like, tried to, like, protest it, and they were, they were kicked out of the hospital just recently, maybe at the beginning of the year, there was a group of midwives 10 miles up the street at a local hospital, they shut down the midwifery program, like any time that they're coming in, and the doctors are realizing that people are choosing midwives over their obstetrical practices, there's going to be a big stink, and those midwives will be removed. It's just what happens. And, and, and we, the people, don't really have much pull in in changing that.

And on the medical side, you know, we just continue to develop more and more interventions, which, in an individual case, unused under the right circumstances, you know, might save a mom and baby, yes, but when it's applied to every birthing mother, it causes more harm. So as we become more advanced in medicine, the you know, the unfortunately, health care on that side is not improving, and then so you have more people going outside the system and choosing that. And as that takes hold, the medical system, you know, fights harder. So I certainly can see why it happens, and it is a divergence and it isn't. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to get the two sides to work together. But the sad part is, when the two sides work together, in the small little cases where it happens, like in your little world, where you have a small, little community of people working together, it's beautiful and it works, and it's the best thing for women and babies, because they get all the right things, and they get individualized care, and when they need the medical side, they get the medical help that they need in the appropriate way. Yes, but it's just so few and far between that it's like that because midwives and OBS don't want to work together in that way.

I feel for the home birth midwives in this country ever since we did an episode with her mean Hayes Klein and Lindsay. I know you know her, right? Of course, yeah, she's wonderful, yeah, yeah. She's been on the podcast four times now, and one of my favorite episodes we did with her was just exactly talking about this. It was talking about how home birth midwives and the women who birth with them. Don't have a system for transfer and be as a result of that, it is less safe to have a home birth year than in parts of Europe, right? Because there is, there isn't a system. And Trisha and I have had women share their birth stories on the podcast, and we also do birth story processing sessions with women who've had traumatic experiences and some of these stories, I mean, I don't have to tell you, I guess, but it's heartbreaking, like they're they're dropped off, and the midwives are not accepted, and they're not at the birth. And in some states, and I don't know about California, but in some states, the midwife must release the woman from her care at 42 weeks, if she hasn't had the baby yet. Are you facing. Missing that in your press? Yeah, that was that's 2014 we had that. See, that's what I mean about the laws getting worse in California. And whatever California does, Connecticut follows. So I'm very attuned to what California is doing. It's always coming our way next, and I can think off the top of my head of four or five horrific things that I think are happening in your state and ours. What do you do about that? I don't even know how you can bear to practice knowing that that's looming over your clients. I love to hear of home birth midwives who fudge the due date because it's like, Screw you guys. Like any woman should be allowed to birth at home with whomever she wants. The fact that the state gets involved in that is is absolutely outrageous. She's allowed to birth at home with nobody, yeah, but she can't birth at home with a skilled, trained professional. Are you kidding me? So What? What? What do you do about that in your own practice?

So in 2014 the State Medical Board of for the state of California took away our twins. They took away our breaches, and they took away our past post, 42 weeks, everything then was just informed consent that we could do those things, but the mom and dad would have to that. Mom and partner would have to sit down and make a decision with informed consent, and they would say, you know, we see the risks in this, and we choose to continue on with care. So we we lost. We lost that. And what I found over the last because now it's been 10 years since we've had this, and you know, Dr Stu is a good friend of mine, and he would come in and take care at 42 weeks, but then they're looking at it cost a lot more money, and, you know, they're now, they're up against a system, and they're spending more money. And it's like, that's tricky in itself, because they've already paid me, I'm still going to be there as their midwife. But now they're paying another practitioner because of a piece of paper that some politician up in Sacramento has said it's unsafe for you to do so, and you can't make any decisions. And I find that that wasn't it was, I'm so grateful, but that's also not that great for most people, because they can't afford to have pay both for me and Stu and what I found is that I don't really talk about it that much like I say it in the consultation. The state of California says we can have a home birth between 37 to 42 weeks, and after the due date. I don't bring it up much, because I feel that anytime that it's brought up, it's going to put stress on the mom, and then it's going to create all of these stress hormones, which is going to inhibit oxytocin from working. And then they're sitting with an expiration date on their head and looking at this looming date and and in my experience, probably in the last five years, I I've just been very quiet about it. And, you know, people are like, when are you going to risk me out? I'm like, we're not. Like, we're not going to need that. Don't even worry about it. And most of the time, you know, this is very fair. This isn't based in science. This is just what I've experienced with the emotional well being of my clients. If I keep them in an emotional state of joy, in an emotional state of not being in fear, their bodies will respond and they will have their babies prior to 42 weeks. Now, do some people gestate normally pass that? Yeah, of course. And there's ways around all of that. You know, at that point you like, look at, was there an early ultrasound? What do our dates match conception? Do our you know, there's, there's ways around all of that, but for the for the most part, I find that I don't even need to do that, like I just happened recently. I just had a mom that gave birth at 41 and I think she was 41 and five on Monday, and she she called me and she said, So, so what are you risking me out? And I said, Honey, I'm not risking you out. Like we're gonna do this together. I'm not. There's, there's nothing that we're gonna do. And then she had a baby. So it's, it's, that's what I find is to be the most effective. Because I promise you, I know many midwives in my state that count down the days, and some of them risk them out before 42 weeks and get this. The majority of them, if mom reaches 42 weeks, will send their clients to the hospital at midnight on the 42nd week and have them go get induced. Like, what at each trail, yeah, to the principles of home birth Midwifery, what do you do if your mother reaches 42 weeks, what in that moment do you do? So typically, it's, it's it's patient led, it's client led, like, they'll be like, okay, like, we want to, like, see what's appropriate. We want to see if there's something we can do. And I feel like there are ways, like acupuncture and different things that we can do to encourage labor, you know. And again, that's also where we get to sit, and we get to look at conception date and LMP and how long cycles are and what did the ultrasound say. And I feel like there's a little bit of wiggle room always within that. There's always wiggle room. It's not a it's not a precise science.

I'm so happy to hear that. Linda, yeah, that's so caring, and you're absolutely right. Yes, there's no research on it. I've said this just as a HypnoBirthing instructor to so many topples over the years, there's no question you're dramatically in. Increasing the likelihood of those women going into labor sooner because of oxytocin. I've seen trends through the years of women being told risking out of birthing centers, oh no, it's next Thursday. What if? I'm convinced they're more likely to get to that date. And the women this is another conversation for another trend that is very upsetting, but I've seen it in my my practice, of my work. I've seen it for over 10 years now, such an outrage. Women being told that they're 28 week obstetrician checkup that the baby is breach and let's just put a C section date on the calendar, as if the obstetrician can't find 20 minutes in any day of their work life to squeeze in yet another C section. Let's just get it in my calendar, just in case that baby stays breach as if any 28 week old baby is actually preparing for birth time and time again, I said, I cannot believe this. They become convinced, and I can't believe how common it becomes now it's, I mean, it's a huge psychological impact with those when that happens, I do something that's called belly balancing. And so I will have women I work with an amazing chiropractor in my office, and I'll have women that will contact me and say, you know, I have heard that you're really good at helping breach babies turn. And, you know, is there any way we could come in and consult with you? And it you get to this place where you're you're like, okay, like, What? What? What happened prior? What is your doctor telling you? And then the first thing I'll always ask them is, how have you been emotionally during this pregnancy? First question, and with within that first five minutes of meeting them and me asking one simple question, tears, usually 99% of the time on their face, you know, like, my mom passed, or, like, like, significant, big things. And what I always say is that breech babies tend to want to be closer to mom's heart if there's something that's emotional that's happening. And so instead of taking the time to schedule that C section at 28 weeks, why don't we focus on their emotional well being and start asking questions, which you guys know that would never happen in our current medical state, that's not even any sort of training that's been involved with, you know, obstetrical care, but those questions are so important, and then I find that just with those conversations being had and providing a space for women to feel safe, their babies turn without even doing anything. Yeah, my midwife, my midwife mentor, always taught me, with breech babies, that you need to get to the heart of the mother's feelings about birth to are you really ready to have this baby? Do you is this? Is there something you're still afraid of? It's something holding you back? Are you ready to step in to motherhood, because we're not always no and a lot of times there's a lot of emotion that's being held back, and as soon as you access that, the tears flow, the emotions flow, and the baby turns, yeah, yep. And we, you know, we look at birth as just the birth of a baby, but I feel, if not more equally important, like obviously a soul coming onto this planet is hugely impactful and such a big thing, but a a woman birthing herself to be a mother is just as huge and impactful. And there's really no conversation around that. There is between us. There is between midwives. You know, we know this, but when a a woman is changing her entire being, you will never be the same person ever again. Once you become a mother, ever there's there's not even a resemblance of what the old G looked like, because your entire life is now dedicated to another human being. Your entire heart is now living outside of your body for this, for this human and so that's really, really, really scary to some women, especially if they grew up in a house where they didn't have good parents, especially if that was never modeled for them. And so I feel like, you know again, let's address the emotional state for everybody first, for all things throughout medicine in our country, it's not just birth, but throughout all things. Let's just ask somebody how they're freaking doing. How are you doing? Like, and not a surface level question, like, sit down with them and hold their hand and look into their eyes. How are you doing? How are you really doing? What do you need right now? How can I help you get what you need right now? Do you know how much that would change everything?

And lordy knows you can't do that in a seven minute prenatal visit.

Of course not. Of course not. Yeah.

So overall, are you seeing positive or negative trends in home birth? Maybe we're afraid it sounds like a little bit of both.

Well, the numbers are going up. More, more people are definitely waking up to to home birth, the statistic was that it's increased 60% not that it's at 60% of birth, but it's increased 60% since 2020 it's like it was around 1% now it's like around 2% that's basically big increase.

So has this huge, huge for. Short period of time, in the beginning of 1900 that all babies were born at home, right? Everything is perspective and relative. Home birth is the original birth. Let's not forget that, yeah, it's like, it's such a big deal, home birth is making a comeback. I'm sorry, home birth was always the birth. Yes, hospital birth is the trend, not home birth. Just like when we say the risk of stillbirth doubles after, you know, 41 weeks of pregnancy. I mean, we it's, that sounds very scary and very big, but then you look at the actual numbers, and we're talking very, very small, and you look at the risk of induction, and you compare it to that. And then we're, then we have a real story there, and the risk of induction leading to cesarean, and then the risk of maternal death increasing from cesarean compared to problems with the baby and yeah, separation of mom and baby and breastfeeding complications, and then lifelong complications. Yeah. How about this question? Lindsay, we get this one a lot in our community. How do we help mothers? It's often time the mother is ready to choose home birth, but the spouse or the family, the aunt, the mother, the mother in law, somebody in the family who's very influential in that, in that mother's life, is not on board with choosing home birth. How do we help mothers choose home birth the first time? Why is it so much that, you know, we can only have home birth if we've tested our pelvis in the hospital the first time? I hate the influential stuff, because I feel like it's like, especially like an aunt, or like a mother in law or something like that, because it's something that's really none of their business, right? They've done no education. They've on it. They've had, they've, you know, go watch the business of being bored, for God's sakes before you start talking about why it's so dangerous for somebody to have a home birth. Another one I really love is, why not home I don't know if you guys have ever watched that one, but that's a really good one. I have seen that that was excellent. That's the one where they featured the study where home birth versus hospital birth was done, and they intentionally, in that study, left out 570,000 or so data points from Holland, because they were so promising for home birth. They just yeah, that was the documentary that covered that is good.

Yes, it was a documentary that was done basically why not home was why doctors and nurses were choosing to have home births. The majority of people that they interviewed were doctors and nurses. So I find I really like when dads have a little bit of opposition, because a dad's job is to protect that is, that is, throughout all of time, our primitive cave man brain is to protect our family, like it's it is his job to make sure that his wife doesn't get eaten in a cave, like he's standing outside making sure the lion doesn't come in. And so those are my favorite dads, because they're actually doing what they're supposed to do, like they're really trying to protect it. Because A, they don't have any information, probably, and B, they just need to sit down with a human being and talk about their fears. And so typically, I'll have the dads come in with a list of questions, and we'll move through it and go through it. And I feel like, if maybe not the first time, but maybe the second time, once they're being heard and once they're being addressed with what their fears are, that they tend to get on board pretty quick, like that's that's my experience of it. Anyways, if I have a dad that has significant fears that he worries will impact his wife's mental state, I'll set up individual meetings prior to their their family prenatal. I'll have the husband come in, the partner come in before and we'll spend, you know, 15 to 30 minutes talking about their fears, just just me and them. That's it. Like there's no, there's no reason for us not to have those conversations. And I invite the mother in law, is in too, you know, like, I say, like, if there's somebody that's really giving you a lot of opposition, even though I say that you shouldn't be really broadcasting to the whole world that you're having a home birth until you've given birth, because you're going to get all of that external opposition. But if there, if there is the naysayers that are close, that know you're having a home birth, bring them into a prenatal they're going to walk into a warm, welcoming space. My office looks like a home. They're going to come in, they're they've never, ever, ever had medical care like that, ever. They're going to sit down and automatically have a breath of fresh air because it feels good in our space. And then they're going to be given the platform to ask questions. I had a mom that came in once with mother and mother in law, and they came in, they were both Latino Latinas, and they came in like they were, like, gonna throw fireballs at me.

And really, literally, yeah, but it wasn't intimidating to me. I literally sat down. You disarmed. The thing is, when you when you start having the conversation about home birth, and you actually get into the the numbers and the statistics and this and the data, it's no longer it disarms everyone. It's like, oh, I didn't know that. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that sounds pretty good. Oh, okay. I didn't think it was like that. Oh, and you can manage a postpartum. Hemorrhage at home. Oh, and you can give the baby oxygen, and you can stitch up the mother. Oh, my gosh. Like all these things that they're afraid of, that they need the hospital for, they suddenly realize, one, they're less likely to happen at home. And two, you are trained to manage them, and, you know, carry life saving medical equipment with you. And there's one more there's one more angle to this that I implement when I'm teaching, because very often in the first session of my HypnoBirthing class, I have a lot of couples where typically the husband rather than the wife, he doesn't want a home birth, if she's leaning toward it, yep. And not only is it a great, interesting conversation on what's happening in the industry and the statistics, and we all love the data. We're all using our intelligent brain. But I always make a point of saying, Listen, how many women walk into a hospital and stiffen and whisper under their breath I hate hospitals, and how many women would say, I can't bear the thought of birthing at home, I just wouldn't feel safe here. Would you really ask any woman estates in my class to give birth in a place that she hates? Do you know what that does to her, mentally, physiologically, the impact it has on her birth itself? She'll have a totally different birth outcome. Your birth isn't predestined. This is a very important point I get across in my class. Your birth isn't predestined. You influence your own birth. Of course, you it's not done. It's not in the car. You're going to influence it with your thoughts, with your breath, with your emotions, with how the people around you make you feel environment. So can we please give a little more respect to yes, that statistics are a great part of the conversation, but as a society can it's back to what you said earlier. Lindsay, what does she want to do? Because if she doesn't feel safe at home, by no means would we want to talk that woman into birth at home. We have no stake in that, no opinion in that. But if she doesn't feel safe outside of her home, she must birth at home and get the support to birth at home. Yeah. I mean, I know you guys know ina MCAS and talks a lot about the sphincter law. I mean, it's the same thing, like, and I really like to say that there is the cervical dilation, but there's also this vaginal dilation. We have a vaginal sphincter. And so if we're rigid and tight and we're, you know, all caught up in ourselves, like, that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And I really try to like and have a man understand this is I talk about orgasm, like, could you go into a place that you hated and there was 10 people looking at you with bright lights, telling you to perform, telling you like, screaming at you. Would you be able to have an orgasm, right? And timing you, by the way, you've got, you've got 12 more minutes, holding your legs back, yeah, like managing your body position. That's telling you how to telling you how to move yourself.

I make analogies to sex all the time in my class, my clients, it comes up all the time. It's the same thing, same thing, same hormones, same you have to feel safe, like there's so many parts of it that we don't even like that would never happen. We would never do that in our culture. We would never have sex in these places. So why are we thinking that it's, it's okay and acceptable for a woman to be placed in these situations to birth. I mean, it's the same hormones. It's exactly the same thing. It's common sense. The reason, the answer that we think it's okay, there's one reason, it's culture. You can convince a culture of anything. You can normalize anything in a culture, and it can be completely backwards from how it was even 10 or 15 years ago. We're experiencing a lot of that right now, in this day and age, it would have been insane 15 years ago, some of the things we're going through right now, and that it's just culture, yep, you know it's like, why a southern Indian starving man would never dream of killing and eating a cow? It wouldn't even cross his mind. It's not even a dilemma, as a homeless starving man in New York City is not going to murder the nearest dog and eat the dog. Everything is culture. Yeah, it's a dramatic example, but it's one that I remembered from sociology in college, and it always stuck with me. It's powerful. Why says that? I mean that could, that could be applied to so many things? Yes, culture, so many things within our culture. Yeah, everything is culture. Everyone. It's really, it's really interesting. I feel like we live in such extreme times. And I find again, like I started, when I was started talking, it was like, I feel like election years now there's this, there's this, like, collective unwellness, and I think it's because of such extremes. And I feel like women are so sensitive when they're pregnant, and they soak up so much of the outside culture and influence, and it's just like we they need to feel safe, and there's no safety right now with everything that's happening, you know? So I feel like if we could bring that back and provide safe spaces for them to come into for at least. You know, their prenatal visits, it would change so much about their birth and and and how they parent, and how they breastfeed, and, you know, move into all of the aspects of motherhood.

Thank you for joining us at the Down To Birth Show. You can reach us @downtobirthshow on Instagram or email us at Contact@DownToBirthShow.com. All of Cynthia’s classes and Trisha’s breastfeeding services are offered live online, serving women and couples everywhere. Please remember this information is made available to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is in no way a substitute for medical advice. For our full disclaimer visit downtobirthshow.com/disclaimer. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, hear everyone and listen to yourself.