Sister Birth Blog

combine the following ingredients in nearly any order. But the first two ingredients must always go in first, as all the others depend upon them.

Here’s a pro tip: Don’t be too hasty to call in your birth team.

We may become too quick to automatically write off midwives with such credentials without considering the whole picture. We have demonized certification and licensure and lost all sense of nuance around the subject.

reexamining our relationship with “need” as freebirthers and self-sufficient homebirthers by Sister Birth

Have you had a labor that felt like it took much longer than it ought to have taken? (I’m raising my hand!) You may have done all the “right” things in pregnancy to set yourself up for quick and efficient labor: Ate the right things, diligently moved your body, did some spinning babies or other […]

Maybe you’ve always thought of yourself as having a low pain tolerance, so the idea of giving birth in a place where you don’t have access to pharmaceutical or medical pain relief is really hard to stomach. You feel sure you’d pass out or be in such agony that you’d end up transferring to the […]

I’m not going to lie: having a low-intervention or intervention-free, physiologic birth in a hospital takes some serious commitment and a lot of proactive preparation. Why? Well, maybe it’s like trying to live in a totally foreign country that doesn’t understand your language, culture, values, or needs. The country isn’t designed to accommodate anything about […]

If my last post was about what can be done during pregnancy to prepare for a birth that’s undisturbed and unmedicated, this post is full of practices to do during labor. Visualize opening and releasing or expanding (not contracting). Some women find it helpful to rename contractions “surges” or “waves” because those are more fluid […]