#345 | "There's Nothing More We Can Do": Two Birth Stories Midwife Sophia Henderson Never Expected

Midwife and mother of two, Sophia Henderson, host of the Born Wild podcast, joins us to tell the story of her children’s births – and how a chiropractor may have saved her newborn daughter’s life.

In her first pregnancy, Sophia navigated weeks of unexplained bleeding, chose home birth as a student midwife, and after giving birth learned her son had no anal opening and would ultimately be diagnosed with VACTERL association. She describes what it means to care for a medically complex baby, how quickly those diagnoses unfold after birth, and how that first year reshaped her understanding of risk, normalcy, and surgical intervention.

Just as her son's medical journey was unfolding when he was just a few months old, Sophia found herself pregnant again—depleted, caring for a fragile infant, and facing new legal restrictions in California that removed home birth as an option. She entered the hospital as a confident midwife who expected to advocate for herself, only to discover how difficult it is to hold onto intuition when confronted with pressure around breech, preterm labor, and surgery.

After her daughter’s premature birth, Sophia and her husband were told the baby’s lungs had collapsed, that there was “nothing more they could do,” and that she was unlikely to survive or at best, would require oxygen all her life. A desperate post to Facebook caught the attention of a chiropractor, who responded that she could see the issue and restore the baby to wellness. Her treatment was performed quietly after being snuck into the hospital, and led to a recovery so dramatic that it reframed Sophia’s entire understanding of newborn physiology and the role of chiropractic care.

Born Wild Midwifery

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Transcript

I'm Cynthia Overgard, birth educator, advocate for informed consent, 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 Show. 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.

Hi everyone. My name is Sophia Henderson. I am a mom of two kids, Benji and Gracie, who are now 10 and nine. And I'm also a midwife. I live in Sonoma County, California. My journey began when I was a student midwife, and we always joke that everyone's final is getting pregnant. So I got pregnant. We were trying, but we know for me, yeah. So we're like, okay, let's do this. And I had a pretty straightforward pregnancy, other than I had some spotting, some bleeding, which can be really common, but it lasted to 28 weeks. So it was a little stressful.

Can I jump in with a question for both of you? Maybe the whole bleeding thing, I never really understood. Why would a woman bleed all throughout pregnancy? What's going on? Is it something with the placenta? What's going on and why is it not a concern?

There are a number of reasons. You can have a placenta previa. That can be a reason. You can have cervical bleeding. You can have a hematoma. What was yours, Sophia? They never found out. It's often unknown, and it usually is self resolving.

I had two ultrasounds. I'd gone to the ER because there was a point it was just spotty, and at five weeks, and then at nine weeks, I dumped blood into the toilet. And so that's when I went to the ER. But they were like, we don't see anything. Baby looks great, and I had one more ultrasound, and same thing. Everything looks great.

So I tried bed rest. I tried off and on a few different things, and nothing really seemed to make a difference. And then it just stopped at 28 weeks.

I didn't have your typical first time mom labor, gratefully. My water broke in the morning, and six hours later, I was holding him in a birth tub in my bedroom, and it was amazing.

And my placenta didn't come out. There was no emergency, no hemorrhage. We tried a few different things, but around four hours, we're like, okay, you can't keep it. So we went to the hospital. I had it removed. We went back home. In the middle of doing that, my son's newborn exam got missed. They had listened to his heart and lungs, but hadn't done the full exam. They had gone home from the hospital, my team, and so I noticed something was going on with his breathing when we got home. We ended up going to the ER where they found out he had no anal opening.

I remember as a student being like, oh yeah, we checked for that. But I never thought what it meant if it wasn't there, so I didn't really know what it meant. And then he was transferred to the big children's hospital in the city in San Francisco. But while we were waiting for the ambulance, poop started to come out of his penis. I remember being, I can't even believe this can happen. I remember being so confused, because I'm like, if he has no butthole, how did poop get inside his penis? I was so confused and exhausted.

Internally, there were openings. Things were not closed off. Internally, this is frightening. Is this incredibly rare? It's just unbelievable. I can't imagine. Trisha, have you ever heard of this? I've never seen it. I know it can happen, but I've never seen it myself.

The thing I want birth workers to know is if you ever see an imperforate anus, no anal opening, it is highly likely that it's connected to a heart condition. That's the thing that would make you want to get to the hospital sooner than later. It’s an emergency regardless because of bacteria and toxicity. But what's the link to the heart?

It turns out he has a condition called VACTERL Association, which is an acronym that stands for all the areas of the body that can have defects. Sometimes you find them all out at once, but usually it's a slow unraveling over years. For us, we found all the things.

V is vertebrae. You could take 100 VACTERL kids, and they could all have different configurations. That's what makes it tricky to diagnose. For Benjamin, his spinal cord, instead of just free flowing, tethered to his spinal column. As he grew, it was getting tighter. He had that spine surgery repaired.

A is anal. He had an imperforate anus and his rectum connected to his urethra. He had a colostomy bag for a year. That was his first surgery: to make an opening for the poop to go somewhere. Then he had many pelvic reconstructive surgeries, and then they put his intestines back together when he was a little over a year.

C is cardiac. For Ben, he has tetralogy of Fallot, which is one of the more serious heart defects, but the most common. They know a lot about how to help these babies. He had heart surgery at six months.

T is tracheal. For Benjamin, he has tracheomalacia. Everything is really floppy instead of cartilage, so it collapses easier with colds and things like that. He’s very wheezy when he runs, and he's missing a lobe on his right lung. Colds hit him really hard. His third year, we spent a lot of time on helicopters and in the hospital.

E is esophageal. He has no issues with his esophagus, but some kids’ esophagus can dead end, and they have to create an opening.

R is renal. He had kidney reflux, but when he did the spine surgery, that resolved. Some kids can be missing kidneys.

L is limb deformities. He doesn't have anything there. All of his things were repairable.

How is he today? You would never know. We do enemas every morning because of all the bowel surgeries. He doesn't have a canal with sensory input, so we do an enema, and then it flushes him out, and then he's usually good to go for the rest of the day. Right now, I am suspecting he might have a retethering of his spinal cord. We're in the process of figuring out if he needs surgery or if there's things we can do to reduce scar tissue. He does checkups on his heart. That was the scariest thing to learn about, and it's been a non issue. Besides his one heart surgery, it's been easy going for that. And we check up on his lungs. For a while his lungs were constantly an issue, and now it's not really a problem.

When Ben was seven months, before we were done with his surgeries, I found out I was pregnant again. When he was seven months old. I didn't have a choice. I wasn't nursing him. I tried. I was able to get him donor milk for two years. I wasn't nursing him, so my cycle returned right away. Gracie decided to come early, and my husband said, it's already hard. Let's just keep going. Instead of waiting till we're sleeping through the night. And I believed him, so we kept going.

Looking back, I was so depleted. I wasn't thinking about myself at all. I was so focused on my son. Having back-to-back pregnancies, one of the worries is preterm labor, which I started to have around 30 weeks. I thought it was just a backache, but my midwife was like, time those. And I was like, time a backache? Oh, you think this is contractions? They were every four minutes. She had me get in an Epsom salt bath, drink a glass of wine. It sounds luxurious, but it was not. I had a tub meant for children. It was uncomfortable, but it worked. I was able to stop contractions off and on for about five or six weeks.

Why are midwives so big on that glass of wine in pregnancy? It does not sit comfortably with me. All midwives recommend it. Is it worth it? Does it really relax women? I did have it. My memory is vague, but I think I had it. The baby is definitely fine. When you haven't had wine in months, half a glass relaxes you pretty fast. Maybe it's more about calming the mental anxiety, the combination of mental calming and physical relaxation. A glass of wine isn't going to lead to fetal alcohol syndrome.

Around 36 weeks it was happening again, and it was clear it was not stopping. In California, midwives can only support home birth between 37 and 42 weeks. I was over a week shy of having a home birth with my midwife. So we went to the hospital.

I wasn't nervous. I walked in cocky as a student midwife who had her baby in six hours. I was like, stand back and watch what birth looks like. And I had a C section. I was so confused how that happened. It's hard to advocate for yourself when you're a mom in labor. They did a vaginal exam, and she was breech. They wanted to do a C section right away, but I said no. The laws restricted midwives from attending breech or twins at home. Before that, midwives supported breech. I felt confident. My midwife was with me. We felt confident. I signed against medical advice and thought I'd just have my baby and go home. But they kept sending in higher ups to tell me horrible things that could happen.

Her labor was longer than my son's. I couldn't get into labor. I was distracted and advocating. So I decided I'm going to get this baby to turn head down. I did spinning babies, visualization. She was rolling inside me. Even during the ultrasound, they said, okay, she's head down. Now she's transverse. Now she's breech again. She was flipping.

Then she was head down, but all her umbilical cord was presenting first. I was eight centimeters, bulgy bag full of cord, then baby. I got my butt in the air, sat with that for an hour. If you're going to do a miracle, do it now.

If my water breaks and the cord rushes out, they will knock me out for a C section. I won't be present. A cord prolapse. It hadn't happened yet, but it was possible. Within that hour, another ultrasound showed she had turned transverse, and the cord was still in the birth canal. So I said it's time for a C section. We went in. I feel like I made decisions based on other people's fear. I had no fear of breech, but I did things to manipulate her position and put myself in an emergent situation.

That was a lesson. I made big decisions based on everyone else's fear. When you say that, it sounds like regret. Because she's healthy and I learned something, I don't regret. It was worth it. It was supposed to be that way. As a midwife, I share with families: it's important to decipher between other people's fear and your intuition. Everyone at your birth shapes it.

If I could relive it, I never would have left my house. I thought I knew enough to keep myself safe and advocate. I didn’t think they would affect me. I trust intuition. At both of my births, one in a birth center, one at home, with different midwives, they told me I was hemorrhaging and gave Pitocin. I have certainty I wasn’t hemorrhaging. I look back and think, damn it. Why did they have to do that? There's nothing to be done. But I know what you're saying. When you have conviction in intuition, you can't prove it to anyone. It's just a knowing. We accept it and move on.

When I acquiesced to the C section, I cried and grieved. Then I put my midwife brain on. Now I get to experience this. They did the epidural. It feels like a warm blanket. Remember this sensation. You'll relate to women going through this. I didn't hold on to grief or trauma after that. That’s my personality. I can keep going.

The regret thing: I'd do something differently, but I've processed and taken so much from it. I don't regret. With Ben’s journeys, at one point they told me to give him albuterol to see if he had asthma. My whole body said no. But I talked myself into it, and that was his first helicopter ride because it closed his throat. I don't regret it because he's fine. I learned to tell the difference between fear and intuition. My intuition is matter of fact. My fear is a lot of dialogue and emotions. My intuition is calm and clear. Anything else is anxiety and fear. I got enough experiences to understand the difference.

Now, what I'm about to tell you. Gracie was born by C section. Within a few hours, she crashed. They said her lungs had collapsed and there was nothing left they could do for her. She wasn't going to live. She was too unstable to transport. Even if she survived, she’d be on oxygen the rest of her life. After everything with Ben, it felt unfair.

We put a picture of her X-ray on Facebook asking for love and prayers. Our chiropractor saw it and texted us saying, I can see what's wrong. Can I please come adjust her? I said no. Anytime they touched her, she got worse. But my husband said, we have nothing to lose. They already told us the worst case. We might as well.

Because chiropractors don't have hospital privileges, we snuck her in. To protect her, we said we had a friend coming to pray for our baby and wanted privacy. We shut the curtains. It didn’t even look like she did much. It’s not neck cracking. It’s more vibrational, pressure point. The weight of a dime. Network chiropractic. It looks like nothing. They place a fingertip on the spine. That’s how they adjust babies.

She said the atlas, at the base of the skull, was off. And now I can see it looking at the X-ray. My C section took long. Usually partners come in and baby’s almost out, but it was another 20 minutes. I asked if everything was okay. They said they were having a hard time getting to the baby. They ended up having to do a J incision. I can't believe this happened to her. She almost died because of the C section. I can’t prove that, but it's highly indicative. What resolved it was something misaligned in the neck. Why would they have trouble accessing the baby? If the uterus is open, can't they just lift the baby out? I have those questions too. When they went in, she was transverse. The incision is small. If a baby is in a funky position, it takes time. If a part is stuck, or the body is positioned awkwardly, they don't come out easily. She was also preterm. So maybe not just the C section, but the combination. She had underdeveloped lungs.

After the adjustment, within a few hours she was off everything. No reaction needed. Nothing.

Did the hospital learn what happened? Did they have respect? I tried to keep it secret to protect the chiropractor. Someone must have heard something. The pediatrician came in and asked, did you have your chiropractor adjust the baby? I said no. She adjusted me, which was true. He said, do you mind if I talk to her? I texted her. She said it was fine. On the phone, he seemed like he knew. He wasn’t trying to get her in trouble. He said, if you were going to adjust her, what would you have done? She explained. He said it would be a great service to have at hospitals and NICUs. He ended by saying hospital policy is slow to change. I've taken it on to spread the word: to midwives, to parents. I contacted the hospital. They thanked me and closed the case. I’m frustrated, but I'm not giving up. I feel like my daughter wouldn’t be living today. She’s not on oxygen. She’s never had issues. We joke the only thing they couldn’t adjust was her attitude.

It was a moment where I looked back. This happened with my son, and I hadn't recognized it. Benjamin had his first surgery at 36 hours old. He crashed after his C section and was on the same breathing machine. The story wasn’t he’s not going to live. The story was, we think he has a blood clot. We can’t find it. He's going to be okay. It was scary enough they called us from the Ronald McDonald House in the middle of the night saying you should come up. He's not doing well. The next day the chiropractor came to adjust me for back and neck pain. She offered to adjust Ben. We hid it. He got better. At the time, I thought he was just about to get better anyway. Now I question what it did.

How do you bring this into your midwifery work? Is it a prerequisite to have a chiropractor? Not necessarily. I always disclose I'm biased toward chiropractic. I've shared my story. We have a chiropractic team on call for our practice. We'll use them for really long births. If we think an adjustment in the pelvis can help a baby navigate. We've had situations. I had a baby with oxygen levels in the 80s. Not normal, but not dangerous. Organs won't be affected. If they're in the 70s, you don’t mess with that. This baby wasn’t normal, but not ambulance-level. I talked to the parents about chiropractic and NICU. They chose chiropractor. Levels were normal after the adjustment. I knew something wasn’t normal, but I didn’t have to call EMS. Baby midwife me would have. But everything I learned about my son taught me this wasn’t an emergency but needed fixing. The family felt comfortable. I feel like we dodged baby jail. If we had gone, they'd be on machines, then jaundice, then stay longer.

People fear chiropractic because of neck cracking. If chiropractors would stop cracking necks, everyone would go. Insurance pays for chiropractic. They wouldn’t pay if it didn't work. Acupuncture should be covered but isn't, because chiropractors have better organization. Acupuncturists aren’t organized. It should be covered because it's excellent. I’m speechless over your story.

I'm trying to take the information. I'm a midwife working with families, and most of the time everything goes smoothly. It has made a difference. We had a baby with a rough delivery. Vitals normal but not normal behavior. Spacey. Reflexes not present. Wouldn't latch. Not present. The chiropractic team came at night. I wish I took pictures. The baby had a nipple in an armpit. Ears off center. Disproportioned. After adjustment, symmetrical, nursing, making sounds. I kicked myself for not taking the before picture. For them, babies don’t have years of wear and tear. They fix quickly.

There's no downside other than time and cost. It's not risky. People fear it. Painting a picture helps. We've had babies clear up fluid. Maybe they had a faster breathing pattern that resolves. If nerves aren't firing, nothing works properly. People have to stop thinking it's skeletal. It's nervous system. It can help latch. There are network chiropractors for adults too. They never crack. One in Westport. I once went with a severe headache that normally lasted days. After the appointment it went down 50–60%. By evening it was gone. She barely touched my spine. She said, breathe into it, get your brain to reconnect. I didn’t understand, but it worked. It changed how I think about chiropractic. It’s our go-to. My son had recurrent ear infections, high fevers. They’d adjust and drain. They resolved. We joke: cut your arm off, go to the chiropractor. Not the hospital for that, but it’s our go-to. Let's get adjusted first.

The thing I want to say to families is: intuition vs fear. You can get wrapped up in fear and believe it's intuition. It’s valuable to learn the difference and trust what your body's telling you because it's probably right.

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.