![]() Our skills are much beyond what is ever shown. We have IV equipment, oxygen and very extensive training in neonatal resuscitation. We can prep someone for C-section en route to the hospital. ![]() We carry the equivalent of a level-one hospital of equipment with us: anything and everything you would need up to the point of a cesarean section or a vacuum or forceps. She had a doppler to listen to the baby, which she didn’t really use that much. They never show that there are midwives like me who can be brown.īut in, there were three pieces of equipment that the midwife had. It’s always middle-upper class white clients. MH: There are certain tropes about midwives and clients. How are midwives generally represented in pop culture? That also includes ordering all routine tests for the baby. We order all the tests, prescribe medications, everything from the very beginning of pregnancy until six to eight weeks postpartum. So we’ve filled that niche of lower risk, normal and healthy pregnancies and births. Family doctors have left obstetrics in droves. In general terms, we do anything that a family doctor used to do in terms of birth. In BC and in Ontario, if you have a midwife you don’t have to pay. Lots of people don’t realize that we’re covered by the government. Three tropes about midwives are still prevalent: the witch midwife, the hippie midwife or the lay village midwife. Part of that plan was to say that midwives were uneducated and to say that home birth was unsafe. We also have to remember that in medicine there was a very well thought out plan to eradicate midwives. There wasn’t regulation, so they had different levels of education and different levels of equipment. The midwives who used to practice before legislation only were able to do home birth. People have a dated idea of what a midwife is and does. It’s not like the last 20 years it’s been as popular and as common as it is now. Now we’re almost at a thousand registered midwives in the province. When I started practising, there were 80 registered midwives in the province. And we’re now doing around 15 per cent of births in Ontario. It’s only been legal here for almost 25 years. MH: Canada was the last G7 countries to legalize midwifery. NOW: What is a midwife and why are there so many misconceptions around what a midwife does? Manavi Handa: In Ontario now we’re at around 15 per cent of all births. But the number is way lower in North America and in Ontario. In the UK and in the Netherlands, maybe 80 per cent of childbirths are performed by midwives. ![]() They don’t know a lot about the process, especially in North America. NOW: For a lot of people, pop culture representations of pregnancy, childbirth and midwives is their exposure to midwifery. Watch the entire conversation in the video or read condensed and edited excerpts below. They explain what the movie gets right and what it gets wrong. In fact, it’s a job that requires skills, strength and extensive training, which you may not grasp from watching Pieces of A Woman.Īfter watching the film, we spoke with Toronto-based registered midwife and educator Manavi Handa and British Columbia-based registered midwife Hana Lang to discuss the ways midwives and pregnancy are portrayed in pop culture, misconceptions around home births and taboos around childbirth-related loss. Midwives are health-care professionals but in the movies they are often portrayed as zenned-out witches with Mennonite hair. On top of that, there’s a lack of knowledge in the general public around midwifery, a profession once derided as folk medicine that has been regulated in Ontario since 1994. Giving birth can be a long, undramatic and highly unglamorous process, thus movies and TV have a long history of upping the dramatic tension in pregnancy stories. That could be due to dramatic portrayals of pregnancy and childbirth in television and movies. Though research has shown home births for women with low-risk pregnancies are as safe as delivering in the hospital, misconceptions and stereotypes remain around the process. It’s also partially based on the case of a well-known midwife activist in Hungary, where the profession only became legal in 2010. Mundruczó and screenwriter Kata Weber have said the movie is a fictionalized account of their own experiences. The movie opens with a 30-minute home birth scene that sets up its story. Some of these parents-to-be may also be sitting at home watching Netflix and come across Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces Of A Woman, about a Boston couple (Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf) grieving a childbirth-related loss. During the pandemic, midwife associations in Canada have reported an uptick in interest in home births among parents who want to avoid the hospital system.
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