We had three beautiful children, but we were ready for another and prayed to conceive another. While visiting my family in Appleton, Wisconsin on the Feast of the Holy Family, my husband and I left my exhausted kids with my parents to drive through a snowstorm to St. Joseph's Church. After Mass, we found a relic of Blessed Solanus Casey there where he had offered his very first Mass. We asked him to intercede to have a new baby, and of course, we conceived right around that t

This fourth pregnancy and birth was a culminating step in a transformation that had been unfolding in my life for the past several years toward a more holistic and intuitive understanding of health and wellness. Once I began to see the body in this new light—the light of God’s design, discernible through human understanding and intuition—it was impossible for my view of birth to remain unchanged. I’d previously had three hospital births without an epidural, and by the third o

Leading up to Wilhelmina’s birth, we prayed every night in our family Rosary for a peaceful labor. Our first birth had been a terrifying and traumatic event. Our planned birth center birth had been transferred to the hospital where I was diagnosed with preeclampsia, and after three excruciating days of labor my daughter was rushed to the NICU. This experience prompted us to choose a home birth for our second pregnancy. The care we received from our home birth doctor was night

Our official due date was Christmas day. I fully expected he’d arrive a 1-2 weeks early or within 1-2 days before or after Christmas, as that was my previous pattern. Baby one came two days after her due date, baby two came one day before his due date, and baby three came two weeks before. So I truly expected this baby to come somewhere around 38 weeks through just a couple days past Christmas. When we made it through Christmas, I was actually relieved. We still had parties t

Prior to the birth of my sixth child, I had five hospital births. Three were unmedicated, two were medicated (rupture of membranes, pitocin, epidural), all vaginal deliveries with no complications. I've always loved and appreciated physiological labor and birth, so I had considered using a birth center before, but for some reason or another it never worked out. One thing I never really considered was a home birth. I think when you get into the groove with one kind of birth, y

It is common in our system for a doctor or midwife to recommend that a woman's water (amniotic sac) be artificially broken during labor if it hasn't broken on its own. The idea is that it will quicken the labor and cause the baby to be born faster. Often, women will even be erroneously and unethically promised this. This procedure is technically termed an amniotomy. Sometimes it's also referred to as AROM (artificial rupture of membranes), "rupturing her", or "breaking her wa