Choosing a health care practitioner for the duration of one’s pregnancy, labor, and delivery is not necessarily easy especially if you, like me, just moved. In anticipation for our big move back to the midwest, I began looking into the options available in the city where we were going to move.
This city isn’t a huge city but it is significantly larger than the city we just left, with more than half a million people, surely there would be lots of prenatal and birthing options. Given that there are three major hospitals in the area, there are literally hundreds of obstetricians to choose from. But I’m not interested in an obstetrician, I want a midwife. In the midwifery category, even in this fairly large city, the options are surprisingly small. There is a group of midwives that work within the parameters of one of the local hospitals. All births must take place in this hospital as well as all prenatal and postnatal visits. I’m not a fan of hospitals. I associate them with injury, illness, and death. Hospitals make me nervous, anxious, and extremely uncomfortable; even the smell sets me on edge.
I also found two independent midwives that work primarily out of home offices and offer the homebirth option. After having our son with a midwife at a birthing center two hours from our home, and while this first experience was wonderful, I really wanted the ease of a homebirth because the midwife comes to me. Out of the two midwives one’s information was limited and I was only able to find one review on-line. The other midwife had a wonderful and quite informative website and she just so happened to deliver my youngest sister eight years ago. I knew I wanted her as my midwife. All I need to do now is find out if she has any openings for my due date.