Welcome Home Midwifery Services, Inc.

06/14/2025

annual reminder that madeleine lives in new zealand now and so if you need your midwifery care records, you can access them via the ClientCare portal or flick an email to hello@welcomehomems.org or follow the instructions on our website.

love and miss you all 🌻

04/11/2025

Access to Birth Centers across California has been decreasing. Please consider sharing your story to help advocate for regulations that will keep birth centers open.

AB55, the Freedom to Birth bill, is currently being considered by our lawmakers so we need to hear from you.

Register today at: https://wkf.ms/4kYLkz0 and earn a $50 stipend for participating.

Thank you!

03/08/2025

hoping some of our previous clients are willing to provide insight for the oakland session 🙏🏻

Join the Conversation on Birth Center Licensing in California

Since 2012, over 50 labor and delivery wards have closed in California, leaving many communities—especially low-income, Black, Latine, Indigenous, and rural families—without access to critical maternity care. Freestanding birth centers are a safe alternative for low-risk births, but strict state regulations have made it nearly impossible for many to open or stay open.

Our friends at Western Center on Law & Poverty and California Black Women’s Health Project are hosting in-person listening sessions to hear from YOU about the barriers to birth center licensing and how we can improve the process. Whether you’re a birth center owner/operator, midwife, or someone who’s sought birth center care, your input is vital to creating change.

Los Angeles In-Person Session: 
Saturday, March 15, 2025 | 10:30 AM - 1:30 PM
Kindred Space, 2610 Southwest Drive, LA, CA 90043
RSVP by March 12 @ bit.ly/SoCalLS or link in bio

Oakland In-Person Session: 
Thursday, March 27, 2025 | 11:30 AM - 2:30 PM
UCSF MLK Research Building, 5700 Martin Luther King Jr Way, Oakland, CA 94609
RSVP by March 24 @ bit.ly/NorCalLS or link in bio

💻 Virtual sessions are also coming soon—stay tuned for details!

Participants will receive a stipend and lunch.
Let’s work together to ensure equitable access to safe, supportive birthing options for all Californians. Share this post, tag your community, and help spread the word!

For questions, email Whitney Francis at wfrancis@wclp.org or Sandra Poole at spoole@wclp.org.

11/08/2024

Scholarships available for LM students:

09/05/2024

WHMS offers Medi-Cal providers for doula services for $0 copay. We’re contracted with River City Medical Group / Vivant health.
Full-spectrum doula support (prenatal, birth, postpartum, miscarriage, termination of pregnancy support) is available for up to 1 year after your pregnancy. You have a right to loving kindness in your pregnancy, always.

09/05/2024

birth centers in CA continue to close.

08/26/2024

“even as demand for out-of-hospital births increases, birth centers across the state are shutting their doors, unable to withstand the joint battering ram of financial and regulatory challenges.”

https://calmatters.org/health/2024/08/birth-center-closures/

thank you to CalMatters.org for centering this important issue!!

Best Start birth center in San Diego closed after delivering 5,600 babies. Many midwives say CA makes it difficult for them to stay in business.

06/11/2024

Truly important and thorough information on the current state of midwifery in California:

This is the first in a series of webinars about midwifery in California.

05/24/2024

🌿
Meanwhile, here in New Zealand:

I'm in the delivery suite in a busy tertiary hospital. So many parallels between the Waikato and the Central Valley of California in regard to climate but also in regard to population health, economic deprivation, and migration. Many of our families travel from quite far to be here, from rural and remote areas.

Every birthing parent in this hospital has a (direct entry-trained/non-nurse) midwife here 1-on-1 at the bedside for their entire admission. A Lead Maternity Carer (usually also a midwife) follows families through pregnancy, comes for the labor and attends the birth while we backup dance if needed, and then they are required to do frequent home visits to the couplet until 6 weeks. Physicians and anesthetists and other specialists are readily available to consult and collaborate, based on clear and universal transfer guidelines.

I know the system here is strained in many different ways, with staffing deficits especially, and the perversion of western medicine has snaked its way into care here in unlikely places. But I just want to remind my California midwifery comrades that it's ok to envision that something radically different might be better and is likely affordable and much more well-suited to families. It's out there, has been done, and could be replicated but this can only come with an unflinching rejection of for-profit healthcare.

Send a message to learn more

05/24/2024

THE UPDATED LICENSED MIDWIFE CODES LIST FOR MEDI-CAL IS LIVE.
Keep reading :) :) :)

For nearly a decade, even before the shift to managed care, the full Licensed Midwife scope of practice defined by Business & Professions code has been a guaranteed covered benefit (see CA SPA 15-018) for Medi-Cal. At the same time, LMs are restricted from billing for the vast majority of services that we are professionally and ethically obligated to provide. Things like home visits, emergency management, supplies--all necessary parts of LM care--were suspiciously left off our reimbursable codes list. Reimbursements for a course of LM care often hardly covered the overhead costs for midwives. Direction from state agencies, when it occurs, remains ignored by the managed care plans who administer most of the care provided to Medi-Cal members in the state. Midwives are left financially devastated and families are left without midwives.

California is seeing a shortage of Licensed Midwives and now a dire shortage of LMs who are able and willing to navigate this. I can count all of the actively practicing Medi-Cal LMs on one hand. This is not a matter of not working hard enough to "integrate" into the system--it's that the system was built to keep us out, harm our clients, and devour all of us if we happen to get in. If it's hurting providers, I'll guarantee that it's hurting families. If it's hurting families, which families get hurt the most? In the words of my mother, "I'll give you 100 guesses and but the first 99 don't count."

When will we collectively acknowledge that this maternity system was built to exploit women, their babies, and their families, and therefore is not "fixable?" When do we swallow our pride and admit that it's time to scrap it?

In a maternity care landscape of ever-decreasing expectations, will the spirit of this covered benefit ever come to fruition, given the department's shameful ex*****on of the LM benefit having turned off this entire workforce from accepting Medi-Cal?

I hope DHCS continues to work in good faith with the CA midwifery community and I'm so proud of the work of the Institute for Medicaid Innovation Midwifery Learning Collaborative which jumpstarted this shift for us. Also grateful to our collaborators at CNMA who have worked in solidarity to uplift LMs through these changes.