Makes sense to be at home

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

While Carrie Clem was a Berwick hospital baby 30 years ago, now that she’s studying to become a midwife, many older members of her Morden home community are telling her about how they were born at home with “Mrs. So-and-So” many years ago.

“Everyone is interested in what I’m doing, and no one’s been critical,” Clem says.

She’s back in the Valley, finishing up a series of one month placements at Valley Regional’s labour and delivery department, with a local obstetrician and , finally, at The Red Door youth health centre in Kentville. The placements are a requirement in a four-year midwifery program she’s taking in Ontario. She’ll graduate next spring.

“I didn’t know I’d be doing this,” she says, describing her travels and school changes through an extended BA in English she finally finished at St. Mary’s University. “If I’d been aware of midwifery earlier, I might have been in it earlier.”

A couple friends she made in the years since high school – she graduated from West Kings in 1995 – had home births, and “that made sense to me.

“I wrote a paper at Acadia for a course on the history of midwifery in Nova Scotia, and then moved to B.C., where everyone has midwives.

“It was a lot of little things.”

Now that she’s in the course, she’s learning a whole lot of things, from anatomy to women’s issues to mothering and reproduction. Her work placements have seen her in midwifery team practices and, at The Red Door, offering care to young women. She’d love to come back to the Valley as a registered midwife when she’s done her course, but Nova Scotia is in the process now of figuring out how and where midwives would fit into the system.

“When my mother had me at the Berwick hospital, it was with a family physician, and that was very similar to what midwifery is: he knew her, knew the family and had provided all the care all the way along. Now, at the very end of a pregnancy, you’re turned over to a specialist.”

Midwives, especially working as a team, provided continuous care and two would be at a delivery for a woman they’d seen over nine months. They’d also follow up for six weeks with post-partum care.

“We need to situate things in society we have now, but it’s promoting choices and having the support there for more unconventional choices. It is changing and midwifery is becoming an option – it’s the right direction.”

A home birth – or even a hospital birth under midwifery care – can be as simple as “no drugs, no nothing,” Clem says, to having all the options the system has available. “It’s not difficult to make the transition from the intention of having a home birth to hospital care.”

Clem says the first birth she witnessed took in the need for high hospital care – a C-section – but she’s also helped at deliveries in women’s beds, bathrooms and at-home water pools after the expectant mother worked through her labour pains folding laundry or looking through recipe books.

“Our bodies are made to have babies –it’s natural. With good support and good care, it should go well.”