Wood River Midwifery

12/01/2025

Critical nutrient in pregnancy. Needed for oxytocin signaling and receptor formation, which is required for normal birthing and to experience the unparalleled states of bliss and love that women (and babies) can experience after birth.

11/19/2025

There is a reason our hearts melt when seeing the fellas wrapping their babies, snuggling them close and adoring them.

Smelling their baby. Feeling their baby’s tiny wiggles and sighs against their chest. Cherishing the preciousness of their 7 pound vulnerability. Being flooded with oxytocin and dopamine and endorphins and all the feel good hormones that connect them biochemically to their baby, and reward them for close and present contact.

We watch, knowing that our men are transforming. Becoming simultaneously softer, more attuned, and fiercely protective. Our babies’ brains are being wired for love and attachment.

We feel delighted, safe, and secure. We can rest, knowing that baby is tended, safe and secure.

11/19/2025

People have become terrified of giving their babies whole food because of the risk of choking. A very real risk, yes. But common sense can prevail; babies should be allowed to explore taste and textures without the goal of chewing, swallowing and getting calories into them.

They don’t need to be given powdered supplements as was done in the study. Older babies are perfectly capable of gumming large chunks and fistfuls of foods that they can taste without swallowing whole, or that can be mashed up. They should have good body control and stability and be able to put the food in the mouth themselves. (“Baby led weaning approaches”)

Those micro exposures early on shape the gut-immune landscape of the child. There is a big difference between the gut-immune landscape of babies fed rice porridge thickeners in milk and babies exposed to actual fruits and vegetables, phytonutrients, fish and game, etc.

It takes more time to safely introduce foods to a baby this way. Babies require time with our presence and love.

💕

Could the answer to the current allergy epidemic in our children be as simple as feeding them blueberries? A rigorously run infant RCT suggests that adding blueberries as one of the first solids may nudge immune balance in an anti-allergic direction and help allergy-type symptoms settle during the first year—while also shifting the gut microbiome in potentially favourable ways.

The first year of life is a critical window for establishing immune competence and preventing allergic diseases. Dietary exposures during this period can influence the induction of immune tolerance, epigenetic programming, and gut microbial succession.

In a double blind, randomised, placebo-controlled feeding trial in Denver, USA, exclusively breast-fed infants (n=61, start age 5–6 months) received freeze-dried blueberry powder (10 g/day) or an isocaloric, colour/flavour-matched placebo until 12 months of age.

The blueberry group started out with more respiratory/allergy-like symptoms at baseline yet showed a greater resolution over time vs placebo (trajectory p=0.05). Immune biomarkers: IL-13 (pro-allergic/Th2 response) fell significantly with blueberries (p=0.035); IL-10 (anti-inflammatory/regulatory) trended up (p=0.052). However, the changes in these cytokines could not directly explain symptom changes. However, specific gut microbiome changes at 12 months correlated with the cytokine changes, hinting at gut-immune crosstalk.

In a companion paper in the same cohort, blueberry introduction altered gut microbiota composition/diversity (trends toward higher alpha diversity; increases in short-chain fatty acid-associated genera such as Subdoligranulum/Butyricicoccus and reductions in potentially unfavourable organisms such as Escherichia/Streptococcus).

The findings align with broader evidence showing that diverse, fibre- and polyphenol-rich complementary diets plus early allergen introduction help shape the gut-immune axis toward tolerance.

For more information see: https://bit.ly/4i7mr2M
and
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40944184/

11/14/2025

Baby Knut is here! He emerged from his mother amidst the aurora, with the whitest blond hair I have ever seen on a newborn. Named in honor of his Norwegian ancestor 🇳🇴 ✨ 🪢 He adores his parents and is luxuriating in endless love and snuggles ♥️

11/06/2025

The worst test in medicine. (No paywall)

We knew all this 30 years ago, maybe more. But does anyone in charge seem to care?

Will apologies be issued to the tens of millions of women who endured unnecessary cesareans? And their babies, who were denied the normal biological experience and programming blueprint of being born through their pelvis?
Major lifelong consequences for them both, physically and emotionally. Ignored.

I have been attending births for 30 years. I often give people the benefit of the doubt. Recently, I experienced another wake up call hearing OBs talk about their fear of being sued and how it’s their right to muscle a woman into their preferred course of action/various intervention/cesareans to “cover their ass.”

Providers are *very* adept and comfortable and stealthy in disguising their fear of lawsuits with pressure/scare tactics, bogus justifications of safety, inciting fear with irrelevant statistics, etc.

Even as a seasoned provider, I lose sight of the very primal fear that is underlying so much of what providers believe and say and do. Vulnerable pregnant women are the last ones who should be navigating this minefield.

And in defense of doctors, I completely understand where they are coming from. One lawsuit for a poor outcome they may or may not have had any influence over can end their career and bankrupt them. One. This is a catastrophic context in which to help women give birth.

This NYTs piece didn’t even get into all the domino effects of unnecessary monitoring— that women cannot walk around normally as they would in labor, can’t squat, get in the shower or do any of the things mammal mothers instinctively do to bring their babies down. Can’t do any of that tethered by cords to a machine. Can’t even move normally with wireless monitors or intermittent monitoring, but keeping women hooked up is in the best interest of the nurses and doctors. The strip is king.

It’s a systemwide failure, driven by profiteering, the insurance racket, failed understanding of normal human mammalian maternal and infant physiology, disinterest in women’s rights of passage, indifference to breastfeeding, ignorance of postpartum and newborn neuroscience and attachment. I mean it goes on and on.

So how do we disentangle all of the above from a modern woman’s experience trying to have a healthy and happy birth and mothering?

We have to start by going back to the roots of humanized care. Midwives carrying for low risk women should be the default.
Say no to induction. No to pitocin in labor. Get the machines and the beeping and the fluorescent lights out of the birth rooms. Returning to sacredness, to the intimacy of birth, to oxytocin, to family, to grounding in mother and baby primal needs. Privacy. Closeness. Connection. Love….This is available to most women. We must stop lying to them.

Turn off the ***$ing machines!

Round-the-clock fetal monitoring leads to unnecessary C-sections. But it’s used in nearly every birth because of business and legal concerns, The Times found.

11/06/2025

The worst test in medicine. (No paywall)

We knew all this 30 years ago, maybe more. But does anyone in charge seem to care?

Will apologies be issued to the tens of millions of women who endured unnecessary cesareans? And their babies, who were denied the normal biological experience and programming blueprint of being born through their pelvis?
Major lifelong consequences for them both, physically and emotionally. Ignored.

I have been attending births for 30 years. I often give people the benefit of the doubt. Recently, I experienced another wake up call hearing OBs talk about their fear of being sued and how it’s their right to muscle a woman into their preferred course of action/various intervention/cesareans to “cover their ass.”

Providers are *very* adept and comfortable and stealthy in disguising their fear of lawsuits with pressure/scare tactics, bogus justifications of safety, inciting fear with irrelevant statistics, etc.

Even as a seasoned provider, I lose sight of the very primal fear that is underlying so much of what providers believe and say and do. Vulnerable pregnant women are the last ones who should be navigating this minefield.

And in defense of doctors, I completely understand where they are coming from. One lawsuit for a poor outcome they may or may not have had any influence over can end their career and bankrupt them. One. This is a catastrophic context in which to help women give birth.

This NYTs piece didn’t even get into all the domino effects of unnecessary monitoring— that women cannot walk around normally as they would in labor, can’t squat, get in the shower or do any of the things mammal mothers instinctively do to bring their babies down. Can’t do any of that tethered by cords to a machine. Can’t even move normally with wireless monitors or intermittent monitoring because the monitoring trumps all else. The strip is king.

It’s a systemwide failure, driven by profiteering, the insurance racket, failed understanding of normal human mammalian maternal and infant physiology, disinterest in women’s rights of passage, indifference to breastfeeding, ignorance of postpartum and newborn neuroscience and attachment. I mean it goes on and on.

So how do we disentangle all of the above from a modern woman’s experience trying to have a healthy and happy birth and mothering?

We have to start by going back to the roots of humanized care. Midwives carrying for low risk women should be the default.
Say no to induction. No to pitocin in labor. Get the machines and the beeping and the fluorescent lights out of the birth rooms. Returning to sacredness, to the intimacy of birth, to oxytocin, to family, to grounding in mother and baby primal needs. Privacy. Closeness. Connection. Love….This is available to most women. We must stop lying to them.

Turn off the ***$ing machines!

An excellent article today from . Note the lack of evidence supporting the use of continuous fetal monitoring, the clear influence of business and economics, and the money grab from AI companies who claim studies support their product - when in fact they don’t - resulting in remote monitoring hubs.

I especially love that placenta accreta is described early in the article so the public can see that cesareans carry risk. As a result, we need to ensure that they occur only when needed or wanted.

Note that the photo for this article is of a remote monitoring hub. One such hub is up to 60 miles away from the hospital in which the woman is laboring.

“Nearly every woman who gives birth in an American hospital is strapped with a belt of sensors to track the baby’s heartbeat. If the pattern is deemed abnormal — too slow, for example — doctors often call for an emergency C-section.

But this round-the-clock monitoring, the most common obstetric procedure in the country, rarely helps baby or mother. Decades of research have shown that the tool does not reliably predict fetal distress. In fact, experts say, it leads to many unnecessary surgeries as doctors overreact to its ever-changing readouts.

The obstetrics field has long ignored these problems. Now, it’s putting more trust than ever on the flawed technology, often prioritizing business and legal concerns ahead of what’s best for patients, The New York Times found.

This fall, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists updated its guidelines on continuous monitoring, sanctioning it even as some other wealthy countries have cautioned against its routine use…

All three remote hubs, along with 400 other hospitals around the country, use A.I. software to help analyze the heart data. The software’s maker, PeriGen, has claimed on its website that 50 studies backed up its products.

But none of the studies found that the technology improved birth outcomes. PeriGen removed the list of studies after an inquiry from The Times. The company’s chief executive, Matthew Sappern, acknowledged that no clinical trials had shown benefits.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/health/electronic-fetal-monitoring-c-sections.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zE8.145f.FPhFANzFoVZp&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

11/02/2025

‘Twas the happiest of Halloweens for Rachel and Guillaume 🧡🤎 whose precious baby made her way into mama’s arms, on her due date! Surprise! Welcome Maeva Otsisto!

Her middle name, gifted by Rachel’s Great Grandmother Tewa, means “star” in their traditional Mohawk language 🌟

A blessing shared by Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook:

“Now remember, next time you look at the morning star, that morning star is you glittering bright….
I give thanks, for peacefully you are born. I pray that peacefully your life will be ongoing because as I think of you clearly, I know you will always be loved.”

✨

10/12/2025

Excuse the photo….I have observed this to be true in my practice— it’s folk wisdom that has been going around for as long as I can remember (but only recently gaining traction with the new media).

I also see markedly shorter, and easier for labors with first time moms who have trained through their pregnancy downregulating their nervous systems, and getting comfortable in states of profound relaxation with the Hypnobabies program. Zero affiliation with them it’s just what I’ve seen.

And of course, eating the rainbow with ample protein, and all the yummy phytochemicals in the traditional herbs of pregnancy + birth including red raspberry leaf, oats, alfalfa, and others.

At the end of the day, giving birth for the first time is the most profoundly transformative experience a woman can have as the process restructures every part of her physical, emotional and spiritual self. She will be a different woman on the other side of giving birth, and giving birth, by design, ripens and matures her, and makes her capable of loving a human baby beyond compare. But how we live our life and how we move and how we eat and how we commune with ourselves during pregnancy absolutely greases the wheels for this process and brings us more ease.

An incredible new study found that pregnant women who consume just 6 dates a day in the 4 weeks leading up to their due date were 74% more dilated upon their arrival to the hospital, had a 77% shorter first stage of labor and a 42% lower rate of caesarean sections.

Eating dates in the late stages of pregnancy lead to higher cervical dilation upon hospital admission because the fruit contains nutrients that influence oxytocin receptors, preparing the cervix and uterus for labor by increasing muscle response to oxytocin and other labor-supporting hormones. Dates are a rich source of energy from natural sugars and fats and also contain prostaglandins, which contribute to cervical ripening. Additionally, they provide serotonin, calcium, and tannins, which contribute to powerful uterine contractions.

Eating dates in the late stages of pregnancy shortens the first stage of labor due to their ability to stimulate the production of prostaglandins, which promote cervical ripening (softening and thinning of the cervix) and increase uterine contractions. Dates also contain tannins, which have a similar effect, and provide a natural sugar source for energy during labor. Some studies even suggest that dates can increase uterine sensitivity to oxytocin, leading to more effective contractions and a quicker and smoother labor process.

These actions are also the exact reason why women who eat dates in the late stages of pregnancy and far less likely to need a c-section!

The most common recommendation is for women to begin eating 6 dates a day starting in their 37th week of pregnancy.
PMID: 40322306, 21280989

SEE ALSO: https://www.pelvicphysio.co.nz/the-sweet-secret-to-a-smoother-labour-dates

09/28/2025

Hedera helix, aka Common ivy, was/is used in Europe as a syrup, tea, and topical for coughs (including whooping cough), asthma, bronchitis, kidney stones, wounds, burns, and to prevent succumbing to the bubonic plague. It is an expectorant, bronchodilator, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antihypertensive, antimicrobial, antifungal and antiarthritic. Children in the south of France were observed to avoid bronchitis because they drank ivy tea regularly.

In Greek tradition, ivy wreaths were a symbol of loyalty and fidelity and bestowed upon newlyweds. Some early European Christian leaders forbade the ancient tradition of decorating with ivy at Christmas because it was sacred to the Druids, embodying the sacred feminine— the counterpart to the male holly. “The Holly and the Ivy.” Romans added ivy leaves to wine to reduce alcohol intoxication and treat hangovers. (I have never tried this). Ivy was used in Italy to treat scabies and worms, and was used by Hippocrates as an analgesic and anti-inflammatory.

Lily of the Valley berries. Our Lady’s tears. The flower represented hope in Christian lore (legend says the flower sprang from the weeping Virgin Mary during the crucifixion of Jesus), and perfumers have long used the beloved flowers as fragrance. This plant is an “herbalists’s herb,” with a long history of medicinal use from the 4th century through today, primarily as a tonic for cardiac debility, heart failure, valvular heart disease, tachycardia, arrhythmias and dropsy. A favorite among British herbalists as a cardioactive remedy with selective action, low toxicity *when used appropriately*, and an unusual mixture of cardiac glycosides that ensure a slow onset of effect; It will normalize and strengthen a slow or weak heartbeat, without putting any extra demand on pulmonary blood supply.

TCM applications include the above + coronary thrombosis, cardiac pain, edema, depression, mental dullness, loss of speech, paralysis, acute or chronic nephritis, cataracts, and more. LOTV is also a diuretic, purgative, antispasmodic, emetic, and laxative. It has been used to strengthen a long and exhausted labor. In Russia, it was used by peasants to treat dropsy and epilepsy. It was used in WWI to treat soldiers exposed to poisonous gases. Culpeper said LOTV strengthened the brain, supported memory and could restore speech if distilled in wine. A German wine with LOTV flowers and raisins is still made in some areas.

Jewelweed is an eastern plant I have always hoped to get to know but have no personal experience with. The fresh leaf, stem and flower juice or infused oil was traditionally used by North American indigenous people (and then Europeans) to prevent and treat itchy trashy skin stuff like poison oak/ivy, eczema, ringworm, warts, hemorrhoids, and nettle stings. It is anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and a vulnerary. You can simply pull off make an external liniment with witch hazel or alcohol. It is also called Touch Me Not because of it’s feral explosive seed spreading when grasping the bottom of the ripe seed pod, it will launch off and explode all over the place— super fun for kids.

09/11/2025

I’m having a week of feeling so much gratitude for my office that I get to be with you in all these days and years. I love that we can see the light and the trees and sit together with tea. And tears, and triumphs.

This week I’ve seen women struggling with severe nausea and vomiting and pregnancy, women feeling ambivalent about being pregnant, women aching with their whole heart for a first time pregnancy. Unexplained fatigue, chronic UTIs. Women questioning the path they are on with their birthing time approaching. Whatever is present, there is space for it here.

09/10/2025

🎉 More good news! We now have another pediatric care provider in Hailey!

🙌🏽 Gusty Swift is a mother of 3 and a experienced naturopath out of Portland. She also does primary care and has a whole host of rejuvenative services.

✅ check out her open house next Wednesday if you can!

https://www.headwatersofwellness.com/