Midwife empowers women through pregnancy and beyond
An estimated 5.9 million children under the age of five die each year because of malnutrition, inadequate health care, and poor sanitation – all of which can be prevented. Rotary provides education, immunizations, birth kits, and mobile health clinics to empower women. Another resource for women is midwives. Rotarian Andrea Cassidy shares her experience.
Andrea Cassidy - Rotary Club of Windsor (1918), Ontario
Midwives love birth stories. The very first birth I did was for a Mennonite woman who was in Canada illegally, had no health care coverage, and didn’t speak the language. I did one prenatal visit, and she gave birth that night. We typically do home visits for the first few weeks afterward. The family didn’t understand that they didn’t have to pay — funding for my services is through the Ontario Ministry of Health — so they kept giving me cucumbers.
Midwives can provide care for women who have no health insurance, and often do so for the most vulnerable populations. We have 30- to 45-minute appointments, longer than doctors. We see people who have language barriers or mental health issues, who are teen moms, people who are going to give up their babies after birth. They all deserve respect, kindness, and autonomy in their care.
Empowering women is my job. It’s their body and their baby. We ask what they want, and then see if we can accomplish it. Do you want to have your baby in water? In a hospital or at home? Do you want to catch your baby yourself? Do you want your children in the room? The woman gets to choose what kind of testing she wants done in her pregnancy, as opposed to being told that it’s time.
We can prescribe, diagnose, and order labs, and do all the work for your pregnancy, birth, and the first six weeks. We have good working relationships with our physicians and can check with them about problems. Sometimes things get more complicated and we transfer care to doctors, like with a cesarean section, but we don’t leave. We are the familiar face.
We do a lot of training on breastfeeding. In the clinic I might teach you how to breastfeed in a chair. If I go to your home and see that you don’t have a chair, but a mattress on the floor, I teach you how to breastfeed in your space — on a mattress on the floor.
The best part of my job is giving women permission to care for themselves. I’ll come to the mom in postpartum and say, “Your baby’s great. Now let’s talk about you. Are you eating, drinking, sleeping? Are you in pain?” The baby is rarely the problem, but the mom is a mess. I spend a lot of time telling women that it’s OK to take space for themselves. — As told to Anne Stein
This story originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Rotary magazine.