More school than midwifery

Now that I'm in midwifery school people want to know all about it. What's it like? How many babies have you 'delivered'? What do you do for X, Y and Z? My niece, daughter, neighbors third cousin wants to be a midwife, can I give them your phone number?

Well, let me just let you all in on a little secret. The first semester of midwifery school is more school than midwifery. We are not doing our clinicals yet. It's a lot of learning about psychology, history, anatomy, how to write a research paper and how to take a blood pressure. My anatomy teacher told us during the first week of school that our first year is a "shake down cruise" to drop off all the misfit midwifery students before moving on the to "placentas and cervices," or as I like to call it- the GOOD stuff!

Lucky for me I'm already in contact with my preceptor. I've gotten the opportunity to go to her prenatal visits and two of her births. One a water birth and one a VBAC. Starting Thursday I'm going to be working in her office as an office assistant. I'm really excited to start learning the business side of a home birth midwifery practice.

Every week at school gets me closer to January when we can start officially precepting and counting our births! I can't wait to start blogging all about it!

91 days of Autumn

I love fall. It's nice and cool, there is a crispness in the air. Living in Florida, there aren't the typical four seasons that you often experience in other locations but Florida does have its own way of doing fall.

Today is the first day of Autumn and to celebrate I took pictures of plants and other things I found in the backyard...

Biomedicine, a love story

"The techno-medical model of maternity care, unlike the midwifery model, is comparatively new on the world scene, having existed for barely two centuries. This male-derived framework for care is a product of the industrial revolution. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects. Pregnancy and labor are seen as illnesses, which, in order not to be harmful to mother or baby, must be treated with drugs and medical equipment. Within the techno-medical model of birth, some medical intervention is considered necessary for every birth, and birth is safe only in retrospect."
— Ina May Gaskin (Ina May's Guide to Childbirth)

Can you even imagine having a baby without an epidural, an IV bolus, Pitocin, a foley catheter, a blood pressure cuff, continuous electronic fetal monitoring, an intrauterine pressure catheter, a pulse oximeter, coached purple pushing with fundal pressure in the lithotomy position, an episiotomy, a vacuum extraction, immediate cord clamping followed by seperation of mother and baby? Me neither! Crazy hippies!

Midwifery with a side of Anthropology

I love school! The days are long, the classroom is cramped and gets hot, but nothing is better. It's amazing! I feel so happy when I'm waking up at 5am for my three hour drive to Gainesville. I cannot express in words how much fun it is to be in school and to be learning something I am truly passionate about.

I spent 4 years at USF and I never felt this type of passion, ever! I can only imagine how much more successful I would have been in graduate school if I had discovered and established my passion two years ago.

I've thought about how much different my life would be if I hadn't gone to USF first, if I had went straight to FSTM after graduating high school. I mean, I would be a MIDWIFE by now with three years of independent practice under my belt. Plus, I wouldn't have 30,000 dollars of student loans to be paying off.

However, my undergraduate education was more than a four year detour on the path to midwifery school. It was an education in cultural relativism. Without my degree in Anthropology I know that I wouldn't have the background knowledge and skills to be objective and culturally conscious. Cultural relativism is the ability to see other cultures, practices and belief systems through the eyes of that culture, not your own. Plus, cultural relativism applies to more than just foreign belief systems and traditions. The United States is a heterogeneous mixture of all different types of cultures and belief systems.



Take maternity care in the US for example. You have the medical model of care which has its own practices and beliefs. The culture of the medical model views the female body as unable to birth a baby, fears the natural process of childbirth and sees danger as lurking around every corner. Tests and procedures are routinely used in excess because of this belief that the female body is flawed and childbirth is a faulty process in need of medical intervention. Like a fish that doesn't see the water it lives in, people who live in the medical model of maternity care often do not realize that their system is not evidence based and often does more harm than good.



As I become a contemporary midwife, I am also become a postmodern midwife. Anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes on postmoderm midwives:

"For past millennia, midwives have served women in childbirth. In premodern times, midwives were usually the only birth attendants. With the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of modernism, male physicians either replaced midwives or superseded them in the modernist medical hierarchy, leaving them with plenty of women to attend but with relatively little autonomy. As the new millennium dawns on a growing worldwide biomedical hegemony over birth, midwives, the daughters of time and tradition, find themselves negotiating their identities, searching for appropriate roles, and seeking new rationales for their continued existence.

“Modernity” is a narrow canal through which the vast majority of contemporary cultures have passed or are passing. It arrived in various parts of the world at different times; first in the industrializing countries of the North, and more slowly in the colonized and exploited countries of the South. So anthropologists consider “modernism” not to be a particular point in time but rather a univariate (single-pointed, single-minded, unvarying) orientation toward “progress,” defined in terms of Westernized forms of education, technologization, infrastructural development (highway, rail, water, and air systems etc.), factory production, economic growth, and the development of the global marketplace. This univariate orientation identifies a single point in a given area toward which development should be progressing: in economics, that single point is capitalism; in health care, it is Western biomedicine. Thus in modernizing societies traditional systems of healing, including midwifery, have become increasingly regarded by members of the growing middle and upper classes as “premodern vestiges” of a more backward time that must necessarily vanish as modernization/biomedicalization progresses.

Yet around the world, the univariate orientation of modernization is increasingly contested. Postmodern thinking widens the narrow canal of modernization beyond uncritical acceptance of modernization as good, noting the enormous environmental, social, and cultural damage modernization entails, and seeking to generate more polymorphous societies in which multiple knowledge and belief systems can coexist and complement each other. In postmodern societies and groups, conservation and preservation of the environment and of indigenous or traditional languages, cosmologies, health care, and economic systems take on particular urgency and importance, and such endeavors are sometimes considered to be more important than expanding the reach of industrialization, capitalism, and biomedicine.

Around the world we are witnessing the emergence of a phenomenon that I call “postmodern midwifery” –-a term aimed at capturing those aspects of contemporary midwifery practice that fall outside easy distinctions between traditional birthways, professional midwifery, and modern biomedicine. With this term, I am trying to highlight the qualities that emerge from the practice, the discourse, and the political engagement of a certain kind of contemporary midwife—one who often constructs a radical critique of unexamined conventions and univariate assumptions. Postmodern midwives as I define them are relativistic, articulate, organized, political, and highly conscious of both their cultural uniqueness and their global importance. By "postmodern midwife" I specifically do not mean midwives who accept without criticism either their own folk system or that of biomedicine, but rather midwives who fully understand these in a relative way, as different ways of knowing about birth, discrepant systems that often conflict but can be complementary."

With a background in Anthropology, I am better able to understand Davis-Floyd's interpretation of the postmodern midwife as I strive to become an "agent of change." Who knew six years after changing my major from pre-med to anthropology I'd be embarking on a such a dynamic field with a rich, powerful history?

A car load of thanks!

My parents paid off my car yesterday. I cannot express the sincerest sense of gratitude I feel towards them for always supporting me emotionally and financially. I can only imagine the struggles people have when they do not have a strong support system like I have. I know that my parents are the reason that I am so well adjusted. Without them I know that I wouldn't be where I am today.
Thank you mom and dad! You're the best parents ever!

First Days of School

I just got back from three days in Gainesville for orientation and the first two days of class. I have never been more excited in my life! It is amazing to be in such a positive environment surrounded with women (and one man) who are so passionate about the midwifery profession. I am literally excited to be doing homework!
The first book we've had to read was Witches, Miwives & Nurses. The history of women healers has a violent story. Mothers, daughters, sisters and wives were literally burned at the stake for practicing "a more human, empiral approach to healing." The book continues to talk about the "white, male, middle-class occupation" that became American medicine starting in the 1800's.
I feel honored to be able to join a profession with such a long, often brutal history. Women literally died in order to take care of other women and keep the profession alive. I vow to honor their struggle and carry midwifery on into the twenty-first century!