You’re a Christian midwife. What does that mean if I’m not a Christian?
I advertise myself very openly as a Christian midwife. It’s on my website, it’s on my social media, and I talk about my faith fairly regularly. I believe God has called me to the work that I do, and I’m not going to apologise for saying that.
Part of the reason I’m so explicit about it is because I want Christian women to be able to find me. I want women who are searching for maternity care to know that their faith doesn’t have to be something they leave at the door. If prayer matters to you, we can pray. If worship is something you want to bring into your birth space, we can do that. If you are trying to make a difficult decision and your faith is an important part of how you make sense of it, you don’t have to carefully edit that part out when you talk to your midwife.
But here’s the bit I perhaps haven’t talked about enough.
What if you’re not a Christian?
Because I have never intended Reclaimed Birth to be exclusively for Christian women. In fact, I have cared for lots of women who aren’t Christians, and some of the best relationships I have developed with clients have been with women who don’t share my faith.
You don’t have to believe what I believe
I have cared for women who are agnostic, those who wouldn’t put any particular label on what they believe, those with New Age or other spiritual beliefs, those of other faiths, and women for whom spirituality simply isn’t particularly important.
And it works.
God and Jesus will probably come up in conversation occasionally because they are part of my life. If you ask me what I did at the weekend, I might tell you I went to church. If you ask me how I’ve navigated something difficult, I might tell you that I prayed about it.
My faith isn’t a professional persona I put on for Christian clients and take off for everybody else. It is part of who I am.
But there is a significant difference between being open about my faith and imposing my faith on you.
Your beliefs, your boundaries and what feels comfortable to you matter.
Interestingly, I have this conversation with my Christian clients too. Two people can both call themselves Christians and have very different beliefs, church backgrounds and ideas about how much they want their faith incorporated into their maternity care.
I have cared for a woman who attended church and had a faith but specifically didn’t want the two things to overlap. That was completely fine. Other women have wanted us to pray together regularly and have actively wanted their faith woven throughout their care.
Neither should be assumed simply because someone ticks “Christian” on a form.
Sometimes different beliefs give us something to understand about each other
I’ve cared for women whose spiritual beliefs are very different from mine. We don’t have to pretend those differences aren’t there.
One of my clients described me as “heart-centred”, which I loved. She had New Age spiritual beliefs, while my understanding of spirituality is firmly centred on Jesus. There were things we understood differently, but there were also places where we could understand one another: the importance of family, the sense of being guided by something beyond ourselves, and the significance we both placed on the spiritual as well as the physical.
That doesn’t mean I think all spiritual beliefs are interchangeable. I don’t. My faith is specifically Christian and Jesus is central to what I believe. But I can respect the fact that somebody else understands the world differently without needing them to become more like me in order for us to have a meaningful relationship.
I remember caring for a Muslim woman whose birth didn’t unfold as she had hoped. In the aftermath, she found enormous solace in her faith.
I couldn’t share her Muslim beliefs, but I could understand what it was to reach for faith when circumstances felt difficult. I knew that if I were in her shoes, it would be my relationship with God that I would cling to.
Sometimes understanding the importance of faith matters even when the faith itself is different.
So would I pray with you?
Maybe. But not without knowing that you were comfortable with it.
If you were struggling with something, I might ask whether you would like me to pray for you. But you would always be completely free to say no. Ideally, we would already have talked about this long before we reached that point. I want to know whether mentioning prayer would feel comforting, neutral or deeply uncomfortable to you.
And if you tell me you don’t want Christianity actively incorporated into your care, I will respect that.
I do privately pray for my clients. I pray because I care about them and want the best for them, and because that is part of how I live out my own faith. It doesn’t require anything from them.
There is, however, another boundary that I think is important to be honest about.
If what you need from your midwife is someone who will never mention God, Jesus, church or faith in your presence, even as part of ordinary conversation about our lives, I’m probably not the right midwife for you. Because at that point I would have to hide a significant part of who I am.
I won’t impose my faith on you. But neither will I apologise for having one.
What does my Christianity mean for the care you receive?
Perhaps this is actually the more important question.
Being a Christian doesn’t just affect whether we pray together. It affects how I understand my role as a midwife.
As I mentioned before, I believe this is work God has called me to do. Midwifery is one of the ways I serve people, and I believe God has given me a huge capacity to love the person in front of me.
I realise that saying I love my clients can sound a little strange in our culture. We tend to use the word “love” within quite narrow categories. But other cultures and languages have a much broader understanding of love, and I think we have lost something by becoming uncomfortable with it.
Loving the woman in front of me doesn’t mean ignoring professional boundaries. It means being willing to sit with her, listen properly and find out what actually matters to her rather than assuming I already know. To treat her gently and think carefully about the words I use because I know that language can leave a lasting impact. To recognise that the person sitting opposite me is so much more than a pregnancy, a set of observations or a collection of risk factors.
That sits at the heart of my trauma-informed approach to care too. Kindness, gentleness, patience and service aren’t optional extras that I add when I have enough time.
They are part of who I am. You don’t need to believe in God for me to believe that you are worthy of that.
Come as you are, every part of you
Perhaps that is ultimately what I want people to understand when they see the words Christian midwife on my website.
If you’re a Christian, you don’t have to leave your faith at the door.
If you have another faith, I want to understand what matters to you and how that might shape your experience of pregnancy, birth and becoming a parent.
If you’re spiritual but wouldn’t call yourself religious, we can acknowledge the places where our understanding overlaps and the places where it doesn’t.
And if you don’t believe in any of it, that’s okay too.
You don’t need to sanitise yourself to fit me, and I don’t need to sanitise myself to fit you.
We can be different.
We can talk about those differences when they matter.
We can respect each other's boundaries.
And I can still sit beside you, listen to you, advocate for you, laugh with you, care deeply about what happens to you and serve you as your midwife.
Come as you are, every part of you.
I really do mean it.
If you want care that treats you as a whole person, rather than trying to compartmentalise parts of you, why don't you get in contact with me...
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