How to Find a Midwife for a Home Birth
How to Find a Midwife for a Home Birth
You’ve done your research. You know all the benefits of home birth, including less interventions; lower rates of infection; lower cesarean rates; and better rates of breastfeeding. You know that your body is strong and healthy, and that you can have a baby at home if you have the right support. You’re ready to start looking for the right midwife for your home birth- but how do you find a midwife for a home birth? Not to worry, we’ve laid it all out here for you. Follow along to get your exciting journey started!
Start with a Google Search. Google is your best friend when it comes to connecting to the services you want- you already know that! Most modern homebirth practices are easily found through a search engine, connecting you to all the websites you could ever want. Start with the simplest, clearest terms you want, such as, “Home birth midwife in my area”. That will link you to the websites that most closely match what you want.
Choose a couple of websites that stand out to you. Once you’ve gotten the Google results that are what you’re looking for, start looking through the websites. You can get a good sense of the midwifery practice by what they’ve got on their website and what they lead with. What is their stated mission? Who do they serve? Do they seem professional and kind? Do they seem like midwives you can trust? Websites can tell you a lot about a particular practice. Choose two to three that you like, and bookmark those or save the tabs. We recommend reading reviews on websites to get a sense for what people are saying about their experience with those home birth midwives. If you find two to three sites that look good to you, you might consider looking at their other materials. What are their Google and Yelp reviews like? What are their Facebook reviews like? Do they have other materials, such as a blog, podcast, books, or linked websites? Do they have social media, and what does their social media feel like? When you’re looking for the right midwife for you, you can get a lot of information right off the bat by reviewing their online materials. That won’t tell you everything you need to know, but it will help you to narrow it down to the people you might want to meet with!
3, Set up consultations and listen to your instincts! Set up a consult with the home birth midwives you feel most attracted to. Some people will meet with a few practices, others will only meet with the practice they feel most connected to from their online resources. The consult is really your time to figure out what you want to know. Here’s what you want to pay attention to in the consult:
How does it feel to be with these midwives? Do you feel comfortable, like you can be yourself? Do you feel seen and understood? Are they listening to you? The right midwives will feel welcoming, understanding, and interested in you. They should demonstrate flexibility and interest in your birth plan. It takes time to develop relationships, of course, and you won’t have complete trust in one day. You should, however, feel that these midwives want to take care of you and respect the way you are approaching your pregnancy and birth. They’ll be walking with you through this journey, and you want to feel enthusiastic and understood when you’re around them. In our practice, we really use the consults to get a sense for each of our potential clients and let them get a sense of us. We really want to feel that connection to know that we’re a good fit and that everyone feels excited about the new relationship. Midwifery really is a relationship, which is different than typical OB care. We want everyone in the relationship to feel that it’s functioning, it’s healthy, and it’s going to help the birthing person have their best birth possible.
Does their pay structure make sense to you? In our practice, we discuss the payment structure and the insurance billing process during the consult. Home birth is considerably less expensive than hospital birth, and we want people to understand how payment works and how to use their insurance before they start care. Almost all birthing people will save money by giving birth at home with midwives, but it still helps to know ahead of time what exactly you’ll save, what you’ll spend, and how to budget for the costs over the next year as you get ready to have your baby. To learn more, check out our blog “Does Insurance Cover a Midwife?”
Ask questions about management and make sure you’re on the same page. You want to discuss all the scenarios you know can arise during a pregnancy and hear how your midwives handle them and what their comfort level is. We like to talk with all the moms in our care about all their questions. Maybe you want to know how your midwives handle gestational diabetes, or breech babies. Maybe you’re curious about their recommendations for ultrasound, how they handle delayed cord clamping, or what their experience is with hospital transfer. We know that as midwives our job is to discuss all these questions at length with each birthing person, because it’s YOUR body and it’s YOUR birth! We want you to have all the information and feel secure that you know what’s going to happen and you’ve been given informed choice about all the potential procedures. Good midwifery care is all about giving options and making recommendations based on evidence. You’ll want to make sure early on that you feel supported in your decision-making by your midwives and that your options are being presented to you openly and with care. The right midwives for you will give you answers that feel good to you, that make sense to you, and that have a sense of completion. You want midwives who take the time to listen to what you think, and help you arrive at the decision that feels safest and most settling to you.
4. Start care when you’re ready. When you’ve decided on the right midwife, it’s one of those things you’ll just know. In our practice, we want people to get a sense for us, be listened to, and have that good feeling in their bellies when they walk out the door. We want you to know that we’ve got you! You can start care with your midwives whenever you’re ready. Some people will want to wait until they’re a certain number of weeks pregnant to begin care. As midwives, we discuss with people their options for when they start care and why they might do it at one point vs. another. Only you know when you’re ready- maybe you want to have that first ultrasound, maybe you want to hear your baby’s beating heart, or maybe you want to wait until 12 weeks. It’s very individual, and we can counsel you on your options and let you decide, as we do with so many things in midwifery.
Other times, people are coming to midwifery care much later in pregnancy. Maybe you’ve realized over time that your birth goals are not valued by your current maternity care provider. Maybe you’ve realized the hospital you’re planning to use for your birth does not support water birth in the way they advertise, or you learned that they have a Cesarean rate near 50%. Whatever your reason is, and whatever point in your pregnancy, it’s not too late to find a midwife for a home birth. As long as you’ve had regular prenatal care and your pregnancy is low-risk and healthy, many midwives are more than happy to welcome late transfers into care. We know that it’s normal for people to change their minds and have priorities shift in pregnancy, and we welcome people into our care who have only recently realized that what they really need is a midwife for a home birth. Whenever you’re coming to us, we’re happy to receive you, and we hope that this list will help you find your way peacefully and easily!
Thanks for reading our list. We wish you the best of luck in finding a midwife for your home birth. If you’d like to set up a consultation with our practice, please get in touch. We can’t wait to hear from you.
Kindly,
Sarah & Charli
