An Interview with Homebody Midwifery - Homebirth Midwives in Sonoma County and Beyond
Meet Licensed Midwives Morgan Conway-O’Neill, Brigette Barnato, and Clover Brown.
These three are a power team of Certified Professional Midwives (CPM) who comprise Homebody Midwifery and offer family-centered conception, prenatal, labor and birth, and postpartum care in Sonoma County, Marin County, San Francisco, and the East Bay. I interviewed them to learn more about the amazing ways they support people. Many of my acupuncture clients choose midwifery care for IUI support and homebirth and I love collaborating with providers like these!
Nido: Homebody Midwifery was formed out of the need for a new practice model for midwives. Tell us how the group practice is helping you support your clients and each other!
Midwives: We are really excited to offer a small group practice model! As a career, homebirth midwifery has a really high burnout rate and many of our colleagues struggle with the demands of the on-call nature of this work. We found three midwives to be the sweet spot allowing us to give the best clinical care to our clients while being a small enough group, so clients can feel truly held and comfortable with a team they trust.
We utilize this group model because we find it to be the safest way to care for families, as it ensures the midwife at your birth is well-rested and sharp. Research supports that care providers who are sleep-deprived are more likely to make medical errors, have poor clinical judgment, or react slower when dealing with an emergency scenario. To combat this, we work in teams of two and are able to rotate midwives when dealing with back-to-back or multiple births.
Also, we all just really like each other! We value collaboration and find inspiration being in this web together.
Nido: What are your favorite parts about being homebirth midwives?
Midwives: We love the intimacy and depth that comes with walking with clients through the journey of their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. With our care model, we get to go deep and get into the juicy work that comes up for people during this time. We feel really lucky to get to build relationships with our community in this way and witness the births of new families!
Nido: At-home insemination is an important fertility support service especially for LGBTQ+ people and single parents by choice, what do you want people to know about this offering?
Midwives: First, just that it exists! Similarly to homebirth, many people don’t know that these services can totally be done in the home setting! An IUI is a very simple procedure and there is almost no reason that it needs to be done in a clinical setting. Our clients find that having IUIs placed in the comfort of their own homes makes the process so much more enjoyable. Not to mention the relationship built with a small team of providers feels much more intimate and beneficial.
We also want people to know that we loooove to nerd out about fertility awareness, IUI timing, and basic body literacy.
Nido: You also offer hybrid care for those who want to or need to birth in a hospital setting. Does this mean you offer midwifery care throughout one's pregnancy and then also attend their birth and support them postpartum?
Midwives: Our hybrid offering is relatively unique and came out of a need of families that were either not eligible for homebirth due to medical reasons or just felt more aligned with the hospital birth model. Our hybrid model allows families who are planning a hospital birth to still benefit from the extensive prenatal care, continuous labor support, and thorough postpartum care of the midwifery care model.
We get to do spacious hour-long visits during the prenatal period to supplement the often rushed 15-minute OB visits. When labor begins, we will meet you at your home to help you labor at home as long as you would like, while being able to offer clinical home monitoring that is beyond the scope of a birth doula. This includes maternal vitals, fetal heart tone assessment, and cervical exams if desired. Once you are ready to get to the hospital, we will help you navigate that transition and stay with you through your entire labor and birth. During this time, we offer advanced labor support, clinical collaboration with hospital providers, and hands-on comfort measures.
After the birth when the family has been discharged, we jump back into postpartum visits. We see families three times in the first week postpartum on days 1,3 and then 5-7. After that, we see families at 2 weeks, 4 weeks, and 6 weeks. Our visits are an hour plus and include thorough breastfeeding support, emotional check-ins, pelvic floor health assessment as well as standard vitals for both the birthing parent and the baby. We find our postpartum care to be a huge benefit to families, in contrast to the standard postpartum care in the hospital which typically includes being discharged at 24-48 hours and not being seen again until 6 weeks. We find that a lot can happen in 6 weeks and families benefit from ongoing care through that time.
Nido: Midwives have to eat too! What snacks do you bring with you to a birth?
Midwives: As on-call midwives, our eating routine can be a bit all over the place. We try to focus on protein-forward, quick snacks like hard-boiled eggs, beef jerky, fruit, and cheese! We also try our best to drink lots of water and love electrolytes like LMNT to stay hydrated during long birth. That being said, what happens at births stays at births and if it's a marathon labor, we are not too good for the simple pleasures of junk food snacks like BBQ kettle chips and Oreos. ;)
Nido: What else should we know about the three of you?
Midwives: Two of the three of us were born at home! And all three of us grew up with homebirth as a normal part of our consciousness which is a bit unusual I think. We all worked for many years as doulas before beginning our midwifery journeys and tend to bring these skills into our practice as midwives.
We are all quite passionate about reproductive justice and see midwifery as a political practice as much as a clinical one. We nerd out on body literacy, fertility awareness, herbal support for cycling bodies, holistic preconception care, and pregnancy release support for miscarriage and abortion. We are midwives who support folks at all points of the womb continuum and are honored to be full-spectrum practitioners.
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Homebody is a three-midwife group practice offering homebirth care, hybrid midwifery, and holistic GYN & fertility services in the SF Bay Area. They aim to provide client-centered, inclusive support for the childbearing year that is grounded in a deep trust in birth and the body. Homebody Midwifery recently found a home with our neighbors at Luma Center Collective here in Petaluma.
You can find more about Homebody Midwifery here
Instagram: @homebody_midwifery
Facebook: Homebody Midwifery