-What led you to become a birth-worker?
It’s hard in few words to explain all the feelings and the thoughts that led me to want to become a midwife. I really like to work with the limits of the body, with the intensity, with the natural medicine and with the essential things in life like love, health, emotions, birth and death. Since I began working with midwives I love this job more and more.
-What do you like to be called?
In french, which is my first language, we call a man midwife a 'sage-femme' (midwife) or a 'homme sage-femme' (man midwife) and I really appreciate to be called like that. For me I don’t think that it’s necessary to say man in front of midwife, but it doesn't really bother me. But a lot of people think that we call me 'sage-homme' (kind of midman). Sometimes, I say nothing but I often prefer that they call me midwife even though I am a man. I explain them that 'wife' is attribuated to the pregnant woman [not the provider] and people are positively surprised, and usually understand why we don’t have to change the name of this occupation.
-People don't hesitate at the thought of a male OB/GYN, but often scoff at the idea of a male birth-worker. Why do you think that is?
The job of an OB/GYN is very different of a midwife. First, they are specialists with complicated pregnancies, while midwives work with low risk pregnancies. A sepcial part of the job of midwives is to support the physiology of the labour and the delivery. Now, we all know sides that less interventions during a labour increase the chances of the woman to have a physiological delivery, which is the most secure way to give birth. I think that it’s necessary to be comfortable to do nothing but support [the woman] in all the normals steps of a labour including pain and all the difficult emotions. For this reason, socially, we are more comfortable imagining a woman to feel confident with a woman in labour because she has to be very empathic with her. Even if one needs more 'feminine' qualities to be a midwife, I think that men can also be empathic and good supporters with a woman in normal labour. In fact, general practitioners also work with low-risk pregnant women, and some of them practice the midwifery model of care. So I prefer to be compared to a general practitioner who chose to only work with pregnant women. An OB/GYN has to do interventions in front of abnormal factors during a pregnancy, and it’s "less important" in these situations to support women. [An OB's] goal is to keep them alive, and we can thank them because we can save women that a midwife probably couldn’t. In this kind of job, we can easily imagine a man because we know that they can be comfortable when they have something to do.
-Are dads uncomfortable with hiring a male birth-worker? / Do men ever feel insecure about having another man support their wife or girlfriend?
Most of dads are comfortable with a male midwife, but they have different reactions. Some are very surprised, most are open and curious, some are suspicious. Some men of different religions don’t want another man seeing their wife intimately.
