Jill Angeles, Certified Nurse-Midwife

11/03/2024

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Remember to turn your clocks ⏰ back Saturday & your country FORWARD on Tuesday.
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10/08/2023

As a CNM, we don’t always take of “high risk” patients from the start but there are low risk situations that turn high risk real fast! I am grateful for the CNMs and doctors that have taught me how to handle these situations over the last 8 years. I am also grateful for backup doctors who come without question when requested even if the situation resolves before they get to the bedside. 💕

80.2K likes, 2574 comments. “There are so many beautiful and tragic stories that have made me who I am as a physician and mother.”

07/28/2023

Posted • Pregnancy and birth complications are not moral failings. There is nothing you can do to definitely prevent Gestational Diabetes, preeclampsia, prodromal or slow labor, tearing, or any other complication/health problem. There is magic to pregnancy and birth, and a major part of that magic is not knowing how any pregnancy will play out. If your water breaks before labor and contractions don’t start there will never be a clear explanation for why that happened. Even if you did “everything” right, if you get to a point in which the risk of infection is more concerning than the risk of intervention, it’s not a failing of you, your body, your baby, your education, or your provider to need to use interventions in order to get labor started. If you’re diagnosed with gestational diabetes and you “do everything right” with diet and exercise and herbs to try to manage your blood sugar but it keeps being elevated - it’s not your fault! There’s no ‘fault’ in the magic of placentas and genetics and epigenetics. Needing medications is not a moral falling.

Consider, when you’ve heard that someone else was diagnosed with ________ (fill in the blank) did some small part of you deep in your brain think, “oh that’s terrible, good thing that won’t happen to me because I’ve done XZY?” Or, “how terrible when that happens to OTHER people,” without considering that it could also happen to you? We’re all susceptible to the Just World Fallacy, the bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve" – that actions will necessarily have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor. Why is that person homeless? Well they must have done something wrong, it couldn’t just be luck.

We adhere to the same fallacy in birth as well - why did they have a cesarean? Must be because they chose to give birth at that hospital, or because they didn’t take Childbirth ed class, or do optimal fetal positioning exercises, or eaten well, or exercised, or or or….
✨PART 2 BELOW✨