Episode 171 - The Midwives Missions with Betty-Anne Daviss
Mel:
[0:00] Welcome to the Great Birth Rebellion podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Melanie Jackson. I'm a clinical and research midwife with my PhD, and each episode, I cast a critical eye over current maternity care practice by grappling with research and historical knowledge to help you get the best out of your pregnancy, birth, and postpartum journey. Welcome to today's episode of the Great Birth Rebellion podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Melanie Jackson, and today I've invited Betty-Anne Davies, who's a Canadian midwife of nearly 50 years experience, to talk to me on the podcast. Betty-Anne is a keynote speaker at the Convergence of Rebellious Midwives 2026, which is coming up next year. And I'm on a mission to bring this, I don't want to call it ancient wisdom, but there is so much wisdom in our elder midwives who have collated and collected experiences, knowledge, wisdom that I want to share with you all.
Mel:
[1:08] Betty-Anne has published a lot of books, research papers, and information. She's been heavily involved in midwifery activism for an entire career. In the resource folder today, I've aimed to collect and collate everything I could find on Betty-Anne Daviss in the resource folder for anybody who's on the mailing list. Today, I speak to Betty-Anne, 50 years midwifery experience. Her mission is to change the world. And I love that. Even in her older age, she commits to having 20 more years of activism in her. She talks about midwifery as a mission and she worked as a midwife for 18 years before it was even legislated in Canada as a profession. Please enjoy my conversation with Betty-Anne Daviss. It's just a snippet of what she has to offer. I invite you to grab a cup of tea or start on your walk and settle into this conversation with Betty-Anne Daviss. Welcome Betty-Anne to the Great Birth Rebellion podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. You're coming out for the Convergence of Rebellious Midwives in 2026. So I wanted to fully introduce you to our listeners. So we're going to jump straight in. Can you describe yourself or explain who you are? If someone gave you five minutes, what would you say? Who is Betty-Anne Daviss?
Betty-Anne:
[2:32] I am an older midwife from a different type of practice than the average, mostly because I didn't really go into this thinking it was a profession. I went into it because I was in a place where it was needed. It was in Guatemala. And I thought, oh, this is something I'm very interested in, even though I'd never had a baby. It started when I was there during an unexpected, well, not expect, totally unexpected, but I was there during a major earthquake. And we'd had earthquakes before in Guatemala, but this was huge. It was the middle of the morning. It was three o'clock in the morning. And our whole village was devastated. Everybody's houses fell on them. There were a lot of deaths. 25,000 people died. And I was just thrust into doing everything from delivering babies and setting up IVs and helping people to breathe better by putting their head back so their tongue could come back into their mouth. It was a pretty difficult time.
Mel:
[3:41] How old were you when you went to Guatemala to travel?
Betty-Anne:
[3:45] I try to forget the exact age, but it's like early 20s and very naive.
Mel:
[3:53] Right. And no formal sort of medical training or any kind of training at that point? You were just doing your best? Is that what happened?
Betty-Anne:
[4:01] Yeah. And no formal training and also willing to learn whatever was needed and feeling a sense of empowerment because they actually thought I knew something, even though I didn't, just because I was from North America. And so one of the things that happened was I wasn't just doing births. I was also doing, I was pulling teeth because we had people who had a diet of a lot of sugar and coffee and I ended up having to help people take out really, really damaged teeth. So Midwiford was part of that. But also because I went up into the highlands, I had to learn how to pack a horse. I had never really ridden a horse very much, but I knew how to pack them after that experience. And every time I'd get up into the village, there would be somebody coming up to me asking if I could help with the birth.
Mel:
[4:51] Did they have any traditional midwives there who were also helping?
Betty-Anne:
[4:55] Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. They always had traditional midwives. It's just that the traditional midwives really, they had lots of experience. They knew what they were doing, but they needed book knowledge. And so I was there for several years and made a decision to send away for books just to understand what the... They didn't know what to do with certain things. Like they had a lot of questions. And what they didn't know is that medical science didn't know a lot of this either.
Mel:
[5:26] Is that where you met Anna Mae? Because you guys are still friends, but you met way before... Either of you had any notoriety in the midwifery world?
Betty-Anne:
[5:38] Well, we met all the farm folk at that time because they were coming down to help after the earthquake. It was a time period when they thought they couldn't help. And they had an organization called Plenty. And I ended up helping also with the, even when I came back to Canada, there was a Plenty Canada and there were people from the farm that transplanted themselves to Canada. So it was a time when a lot of us just got together.
Mel:
[6:05] Would you self-describe as a hippie, like how the midwives at the farm and the people at the farm would describe themselves? Would you identify like that?
Betty-Anne:
[6:17] You know, I would consider myself a hippie, but I never really smoked dope because I don't smoke. And I never, I became involved with a religious group. It was the Seventh-day Adventist Church. So it was a different foray into a different kind of life. It was very similar. We lived on a commune. We all shared responsibilities, shared finances, shared everything just to work together and create a community. So it was very similar, but it was a different strain, put it that way.
Mel:
[6:52] After your time in Guatemala, At what stage did you return back to Canada?
Betty-Anne:
[6:59] Well, after Guatemala, I actually went and worked in Alabama for a while because there was a Seventh-day Adventist outreach center there called Ichi Pines, run by the Thrashes. Dr. Agatha Thrash was a very well-known physician who had become an Adventist, become quite converted, and converted to a form of living, which is getting back out to the country, helping people get out to the country, helping people get back to a natural way of healing and natural way of doing birth. So birth became part of that process. It was like the, I would say, like the type of middle-aged midwife in Europe that did treatment of people with herbology and clay therapy and hydrotherapy. And so midwifery just became a part of that. It was part of the way of life.
Mel:
[7:50] Had you had any formal training at this point, or it was all what you'd learned by experience?
Betty-Anne:
[7:56] Well, it was experience, but we also made classes. We created classes. We had physicians working with us who knew basic anatomy and physiology and what to do when. But some of them were also out of their realm because they didn't have necessarily the normal hospital structure in which they could work, but they knew basics. And if you know, if you understand today what we know about resuscitation, about positions for labor, do you know what? I sometimes think we're not that much farther. Like if you think about the way we do neonatal resuscitation, it's not really based on a lot of science. The way we monitor babies. We know now that electronic fetal monitor is not really everything that it was cracked up to be. So all of these things that we've learned, I keep going back to, you know, I'm not sure that what I was doing back then was any worse. And the example of that for me is the way breeches became an item you have to do on your back. Like, who invented that except medical men 400 years ago?
Mel:
[9:19] So how did you become, I mean, this is the difference. For listeners who are in the UK and in Australia and now in Canada, midwifery is a protected term and you have to have formal qualifications and register and all these things. At what point did that happen for you and for Canada where you were able to formalise all the training that you had.
Betty-Anne:
[9:48] That would be 18 years after I had started practicing. Wow. It was a bit of a shock. But they did something called grannying us in. They did it both in Quebec and Ontario. So I made a decision to go through both programs because I was working in Ottawa, which is right on la frontière de Québec et Ontario, which is in Canada, an important border.
Betty-Anne:
[10:13] So at that time, they made a decision that they would let those of us who had been practicing produce portfolios of how many births we had done. They gave us updated courses. At the time that we were going through legislation, it was 1992 was when our program occurred. 92, 93 was when things really started popping and the legislation came through. But guess what had just come out is the books from the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, The Beginning of the Cochrane, the 1980 publication by Mark Kearse, Murray Ankin, who's Canadian, and Ian Chalmers. And my husband of the time—actually, he wasn't my husband yet, but the man of my life at the time—and I went to Oxford in 1991 specifically to talk to them about home birth, really how to create the best study we could create given our parameters that we were dealing with. A group of midwives who didn't necessarily think that data was an important thing to collect.
Betty-Anne:
[11:28] And also given that the NPEU had their heads tied to randomized control trials, and they were having a hard time seeing past that at the time. They changed since, which is great. But we were dealing with a whole new world. For me, it was a new world of science, which I thought was something I needed to tap into a little bit more.
Mel:
[11:51] What was your experience having had 18 years of being with birth learning from experience learning from books learning in a really different way what was the experience of then moving into the sort of standardized university style or college style education around midwifery.
Betty-Anne:
[12:14] Well, I did have a degree. I had a degree in journalism before I went to Latin America. In fact, I was writing my final thesis. I called it the Guatemalan factor, which is that you can't find out any facts. Like every time I'd try to find out facts, I was living in this little village in Huehuetenango, and I thought, okay, how am I going to find out how many people have TVs? And I went to the top of the mountain and counted how many antenna there were in the area, and I could tell. But then I was trying to figure out, you know, what is my denominator? Like, how many people are in this village? And then I'd go down and they'd say, well, you can get that information from the city. I'd go to the city and they'd say, you get that information from back in Huehuetenango. And I was working with the priests at that time. And it was really hard to get information. It's very hard in a very mountainous country like Guatemala when they don't, even their census is not very good. And that became very clear when they started discovering the massacres that had occurred and how entire villages were wiped out that people weren't necessarily aware of. And I think that's probably, those were my early moments of concern about human rights and human rights in general, not just in childbirth, but human rights for everybody.
Mel:
[13:26] We were speaking the other week about all the work you've done in midwifery and the take-home message that I got from that was that your drive and purpose for midwifery was very much about mission. And I thought, actually, why are we doing midwifery? It really doesn't pay well. It's a fairly high-risk profession in terms of the political position that we're in. And, you know, the modern-day witch hunt is absolutely real. And it's a job with big responsibility. And we kind of landed on the point that really the only reason we're doing midwifery is because it feels like a purposeful mission that we can't deny.
Betty-Anne:
[14:17] Right. So, right. And what we were talking about was this. I realized that I entered into midwifery because I was living in a religious community that felt it was really important for us to help not just our own community, but all the locals. And especially when the earthquake hit, suddenly the gringos no longer were just gringos. They were people who were actually helping this village in a major way because it suddenly just made everybody equal. because we were cut off by avalanches. We couldn't get to the main arteries, and it became really clear that we're all in this together. So we needed them, they needed us, and that's a really, really important thing to understand about humanity. But it was on a spiritual level.
Betty-Anne:
[14:59] Then what happened was when I came north, I started realizing that midwifery is quite different, but also not just midwifery, but the way people do birth is quite different. So we went from doing births in a way that was a spiritual mission, absolutely a mission, I started realizing that people weren't getting what they needed because there was this medical profession that seemed to think that they owned birth. And it didn't make a lot of sense to me, especially didn't make a lot of sense when I found out about Friedman and the Friedman curve, because I'd already been practicing for several years when I found out that, oh, you're supposed to put parameters on birth. You're supposed to do things like, you're not supposed to let women labor longer than a certain amount of time. And I thought, how ridiculous is that? Everybody labors differently. Like, it made no sense to me. But I thought, okay, well, let's figure out how we're going to demonstrate that what we're doing is probably better than what they're doing, because it didn't make sense.
Betty-Anne:
[16:02] And also because women weren't happy in the hospital, so they were coming to me for home births. I mean, when I first set up practice in Ottawa, there wasn't anyone actually practicing there except with physicians. So it was the first time that I ended up just starting because the only physician in town, well, there were two of them actually, but they weren't really ready to work with me because they already had their own nurses that they were working with. And I thought, oh, I'll just go out on my own. And I had no idea at that time that there was even a legal parameter or that I might have to accommodate. Like, it was not in my mind because I was thinking on a spiritual level and I was offering people what they wanted and people were asking me if I would just do a birth with them at home. They didn't want a physician there. And it was basically, I guess, you know, like it was the free birth of God.
Betty-Anne:
[16:55] 1975. That's how we started, right? And that's how people in Guatemala did it. I didn't think of that as being wrong. I just thought of that as being different, and these people seemed to want it. So why couldn't I do that? So when you're talking about mission and you're talking about a spiritual life, what I started realizing that there were a lot of midwives in the United States. I started meeting them because I'd worked in Texas, I worked in New York a bit, And then I joined the Midwives Alliance North America like in 1980 when we started 82, 83.
Betty-Anne:
[17:28] And that's when I started realizing that there are different groupings of midwives. Then I started realizing that there are some that really are very career-oriented. And there are some who actually didn't even believe in home birth, which was astounding to me. I also didn't realize that physicians didn't think it was okay to do home birth. Like, you know, I had a lot of openings, you know, like my eyes were wide, like thinking, why do these people think so differently for me? And that's when I wrote that chapter. Well, that was a few years down the road. It's called, I wrote a chapter for a book that Robbie and I worked on together called Mainstream Midwives. And it was, the chapter was called From Calling to Career. And I said, you know, it looks like people who are aspiring midwives go into this either because they really think of birth as a sacred act, and you really need to follow that sacred path and help transform every woman's life during that very important milestone in their life. And then there were other people who seemed to think, and these were practitioners who had no less noble ideas, but they really felt, no, I want to do the best science.
Betty-Anne:
[18:41] I want to get training in the best school in Harvard and Vanderbilt and these places that had very high standards for education for midwives. And that was just a different path. And then I started realizing that, as I started getting more involved with the scientific aspect of things, that anybody going down either of those paths is going to end up very disappointed at the end of their route. And as they're going into it, they're going to be very disappointed. Because the poor spiritual people, and I had apprentices like this, who just felt that the women weren't living up to their standards of transforming their life. They just wanted to have a baby. And the midwives that were working, trying to get PhDs and MAs and letters after their name, they were never going to make it in the medical world because the medical world is never going to recognize you because you're always going to be just a midwife who's lesser than a doctor because I started studying professions. And this was also not, it was not just the science part, but I was also studying professions because we were going to professionalize suddenly in the late 70s and early 80s. And I thought, this is really upon us. So I made a decision. I wanted to study what a profession is. And I'm not going to go through all those theories of the professions, but it's quite interesting theories.
Betty-Anne:
[20:04] And after I went through all those theories, which is, it's in that chapter called From Calling to Career. It's also my thesis called From Social Movement to Professional midwifery project, are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? But when I went through that, I thought, I don't really want to become a health professional because the main goal of the health professional is to become a dominant health professional where you're usurping other people's territory, you're staking out a jurisdiction and monopolizing a body of knowledge, And then you are trying to make your way through this quagmire of professions and get yourself heard. And if you become a dominant profession and the dominant profession, you've won. And I'm going, that's just not the way to think.
Betty-Anne:
[20:55] And then I started going, hmm, what do I really do? I had to think, what do I do? What do I do as a midwife that I really enjoy? I certainly enjoy the whole spiritual idea of it, but what I really do is I'm an activist. And so, yeah, I have a mission, but my mission isn't to convert the world to my way of thinking. My mission is to help women do whatever they need, give them whatever they need, and get, if it's not the physicians, the system to function in a way that women get what they need. And so that was a very important epiphany for me as I was doing my thesis, that I really think we need to worry more about our general society and what kind of a community we want to produce. So I started studying social movement theory, and that's really where I found myself, because I went through all of these classical ideas about what a social movement is about and what makes them tick and how they need to gain resources and they need to get themselves legislated in order to institutionalize their ideas and how we have to change the cultural paradigm. That's what I wanted to be about. Now, I'm not going to say that every single midwife has to do that.
Betty-Anne:
[22:17] And certainly everybody doesn't have to do my path But I think that we're going to die If that's not what our path is But I think that's also true of physicians I think they're going to die If they think that they're in this Because they want to buy a Porsche and play golf Well, you know, they're pretty happy doing that, I guess But I just feel like I'm here to change the world Nothing's short of changing the world And if I can't change the world Then I'm not really happy So that's my mission, is to change the world.
Mel:
[22:50] So Betty-Anne's mission is to change the world through a brand of activism and mission. And also, obviously, midwifery is still part of your identity, but the big mission is world change and for women to get what they want to need in labor and birth and parenthood all through the whole journey.
Betty-Anne:
[23:10] Yeah, and what makes sense, but also what scientifically makes sense. But, you know, I mean, Also, I hitched myself up with a scientist. He's kind of a good guy. When I got together with him and we started working on the man of statistics, Ida Mae comes to me and she said, hmm, he's pretty good. He's pretty useful. I said, yeah. She said, next we need a pharmacist.
Mel:
[23:33] So you were married wisely.
Betty-Anne:
[23:40] But Ken and I spent a lot of our time being also disappointed because we just thought, oh, we're just going to do, you know, the largest home birth study for its time at the time that we published it in 2005. We got it published in the British Medical Journal. The Journal of the American Medical Association wasn't going to publish it because they said to us, why, our readers wouldn't be interested in this. And I go, yeah, why would they be interested in something that could revolutionize public health? And they, like home births, right? They took it at the BMJ, which we were delighted that that happened. And we were really appreciative of all the midwives who rallied around this. It was the North American Registry of Midwives that really were able to work with. Because we were working with MANA, but what happened was MANA was an organization which I was divine. I loved MANA. That's where a lot of my ideologies formed was around MANA. It was called the Midwives Alliance of North America. It was originally an organization that united supposedly all the nurse midwives as well as the midwives that were home birth midwives, but also it was uniting Canada and Mexico with the United States until Canada started to realize that we don't really fit in this organization because it's very American-dominated.
Betty-Anne:
[24:57] And the Americans were very much into the social movement theories and not necessarily studying the social movement theories, but they were not into science to the same extent that we were in terms of proving the home birth piece. And they were not as much. We were trying to figure out how we could see the nuances of birth. And that was more difficult for them, especially when our data form went from one page to two pages to four pages. And that's because we wanted to collect on things like plateaus, because I realized, again, I started creating this term, plateau, because we had been talking about how in second stage you might have a plateau, but in first stage you have a plateau often at two centimeters, at five centimeters, at six centimeters. And I realized that's the way labor goes. It goes in like
Betty-Anne:
[25:54] It's like you're going in the Sierra Nevada, and then you get to another plateau, and that's how it ever goes. But to get back to the social movement theory, what I realized was science can prove and institutionalize your profession, and it can institutionalize your ideas, but science is not listened to necessarily by the players that you thought would listen to it.
Betty-Anne:
[26:24] Hopefully the ministries of health are going to listen to it i don't find physicians listen to it unless it's a randomized control trial and that's been the problem for many years the randomized control trial which was created you know around the 80s was when it started to become more uh created into a larger than life gold standard and the gold standard created by the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit that we spent time with, became one of those things that unfortunately got in our way on some levels. And what we'd like to say is it's not really, a randomized control trial is very good for drug trials, but when you're studying broad-based, complex phenomena in the world of what Ken calls a Big E epidemiology, which is An understanding of how everything is happening in your community, on the ground, with the practitioners in your vicinity, with the women and their health status. Those are very different. To do a randomized control trial is sometimes very difficult. And so because of that, collecting information in your own community with your own hospitals, with your own midwives, with your own groupings is incredibly critical.
Betty-Anne:
[27:54] But I'm just saying that, you know, as much as that science is really important, I find that people don't listen to it anyway. They often just go off with what they want to do anyway. And they go off with what their own experience is. Of course, that makes sense.
Mel:
[28:06] I'm really keen to explore what you explained about labour plateaus and also your experience with, the retraction of the cervix in labor because you watched labor and birth in an unfiltered way for 18 years and that is a very unique set of knowledge where it wasn't clouded by medical assumptions or anything like that you got to see labor and birth raw and real as it actually plays out without putting arbitrary boundaries on it so one of the things that you noticed was physiological plateaus, which Marina Weckend has also picked up on your original thoughts on how physiological labor plays out. Can you talk to us about what your experience is of the cervix in labor? Curious to extract some of your knowledge around that.
Betty-Anne:
[29:06] So it wasn't just me. I mean, what was really interesting about this is when we were creating the data form. So I started creating this data form in the 80s for the Midwives Alliance of North America. And we started to, that was certainly one of the things I really wanted to look at. I wanted to look at lengths of labor. We put it on the data form and it definitely wasn't just me. It was the midwives in the United States of America that were not working in hospitals were really creating a revolution. And I don't think any of us were totally aware of it at the time, but we were—because a lot of the midwives in that grouping were from religious groups like myself, or they were hippies, or they were people who just thought outside the box, and they really felt that they didn't fit in the hospital setting. And because of that, we were all grouping together thinking, well, what do we believe in? What can we look at? And Ken comes along and agrees and says, you know, what you're all doing is fascinating. He said, I hope you're collecting data on this.
Betty-Anne:
[30:17] And so we started doing that. And then along the way, we started realizing that actually the most important thing for us to do is put out a study on home birth. But in the meantime, yes, these nuances were really important to us. And one of the things that happened to me, well, the reason I came up with a cervical reversal term is because I was just with a woman one day and went into the hospital because she wasn't going very quickly and she was five centimeters.
Betty-Anne:
[30:48] And no, she got to seven centimeters. And I went in the hospital and they said she was only five. And I thought, huh, well, maybe I just have to do vag exams differently from this doctor. So I snuck a glove and did an exam, and I realized she really had closed down. And I thought, she just closed down because she's taken a fright. The cervix has taken a fright. And so I said to, I went to Anna Mae, and I said, Anna Mae, you know, this thing that just happened to me, and I just want to tell you, I think we should put this on the data form. I'd really like to do it because we were, she had been the person who was working with the data form, and she was having a, she was pretty busy with the farm, and she was doing the, working on the farm's data. But I wanted to work on the data for all the midwives right across the country. And also because she was working with a very distinct community, again, very useful, but it was hippies and Mennonites, and I wanted to do it right across the States. So I put it on the form, and lo and behold, I created this term. I knew the term had not been invented anywhere.
Betty-Anne:
[31:50] And enough midwives picked up on it that they recognized what I was talking about, that the cervix had shrunk. And they say that, like, it's not an obstetric text. So I did search for it. And what we realized was it is a phenomenon very possibly happening from an emotional response to something. We didn't collect enough data, I feel. We do still have that data. We haven't, and I started adding things to the database after that about when you've had a cervical reversal, what happens. But the point of the matter is that at the beginning, when we found that people recognized what it was, we found it happens 2.6% of the time. Now, isn't that amazing? We would never have caught that unless we had put it on the actual form. And then what happened was, Sue Downs is one of the people who really picked up on the data form that we had created. She thought it was pretty interesting what we were doing. And we went to Sheffield, I remember, and had a meeting with Mavis Kirkham and some of the people at the Sheffield University.
Betty-Anne:
[33:00] And they just loved this idea. And I went, oh, good. Because I was having a hard time at that time getting the data form accepted in my own province because But in Toronto, I was just thinking about legislation and don't do anything outside the standard. Let's not think outside the box too much, Betty-Anne. We don't want to do that because we're trying to get legislated and look good here. And in Sheffield, they were just really excited about something different because they've been midwives for centuries, literally. And we didn't have that luxury. We still didn't even have legislation in Canada. But as we sat there talking about cervical reversal, I don't really remember who came up with the idea of, well, it's kind of like, I mean, we had been talking about taking a fright, but that's when somebody said, it's really recoiling. So I said, that's it. That's it. That's probably a better term for it is cervical recoil.
Betty-Anne:
[33:57] So again, we just started, we kept collecting on this information. And so when I saw Berena picking up on this, but this is like 40 years later, 30 years later, I thought, man, the Australians are, well, the Germans living in Australia are starting to understand what this is about. And Sarah Wickham was the other one who actually, he really prodded me on this for years. And she was amazed that we hadn't published on it because I think she had seen our presentation. Ken and I had presented it in 2002 because we were showing how often people have these plateaus. And it was at the Vienna convention, ICM convention, that we did it. And we were working. There was another person at that time, and she was also looking at lengths of labor. And so at that time, a lot of us were really questioning that. And it was a time when Friedman was starting to become undone until the World Health Organization decided that he was really undone in 2018. They made a decision to stop using, on a religious basis, if we want to call it a mission for WHO, stopped using the... That bloody, what do they call it?
Mel:
[35:10] A Friedman curve?
Betty-Anne:
[35:11] It's not just a Friedman curve, the partagram.
Mel:
[35:15] Oh, the partagram, yes, which was never substantiated at all.
Betty-Anne:
[35:19] I mean, you know, I used to have these conversations with Anne Fry. So Anne was a very good friend, so it still is a good friend. So Anne and I would get together. We said, you know what? When is it you really need to go in and do something about a woman who's having trouble? Well, one is the baby's genuinely having a problem, right? The other one is the mother, the practitioners, the husband, they're all fed up, right? It's the fed up piece. And that's when you need to go. Because the mother usually knows when she's fed up. She goes, okay, I've had it. I don't want to hear any more about orgasmic birth. I don't know who did that movie, but I don't like it. Who does she think she is anyway? right so it's that's that's where i mean the practicality of this stuff is so much more important than the science and yet the science is so important to us to help prove the practicality of what we're doing so that
Mel:
[36:18] The so when is too long because i because i love this um conversation you know i'm a home birth midwife myself and we don't stick to these arbitrary time limits on labor and birth and women ask well how long is too long and we're like well my my message has always been if the mom's okay and the baby's okay then we don't have a problem we just have a long labor but I love that you've kind of been able to encapsulate it is when everyone's fed up with the length of this the practitioner the parents the mother that everyone's fed up and potentially the baby's also fed up and is you.
Betty-Anne:
[36:51] Know and obviously if the baby and and you know if the baby, if we're starting to get meconium and all those things are happening, then you're starting to get more concerned, yeah.
Mel:
[37:03] How long did you attend, do you still attend home birth now?
Betty-Anne:
[37:08] Yeah, absolutely. I'll have been practicing for 50 years by the time I'm at the...
Mel:
[37:15] At the Convergence.
Betty-Anne:
[37:17] The Convergence, yeah.
Mel:
[37:19] Wow, 50 years in midwifery. February, February.
Betty-Anne:
[37:23] I count my time as, I was really doing it in 75 a little bit, but 76, February 1976 is when the earthquake hit, and I really started doing it in a major way.
Mel:
[37:38] February 76, so you'll be at the convergence, yeah, it'll be 50 years and a few months of midwifery.
Betty-Anne:
[37:46] Yep.
Mel:
[37:46] You've just learnt about birth in such a different way to so many of us midwives who are listening. We've been institutionalised midwives. So your current role is home birth, but are you also employed at a hospital?
Betty-Anne:
[38:02] Yeah. Actually, I went, yeah, yeah, they actually employ me. What?
Mel:
[38:11] You know, it was so funny because when we were talking the other day, I said, oh, look, I probably have another 30 years left in me of midwifery. And you said, well, I think I've got another 20 left in me. And I love that energy.
Betty-Anne:
[38:23] Well, I just, I'll tell you what, I just went down. We're at our cottage right now, and I just went down, and it's getting kind of chilly down there at the water. But I took a hot tub, and I dove in, and it's a little chilly, but it's really, really energizing. My husband's a great sports fiend. He plays hockey twice a week, and I swim as much as I can, and that's how I think I'm keeping myself together.
Mel:
[38:52] Excellent.
Betty-Anne:
[38:54] So what was your question?
Mel:
[38:56] Well, my question is, you live in these two different worlds, home birth, but then also you're operating, you're working as a midwife in hospitals.
Mel:
[39:07] What are the challenges for you when you're doing midwifery in a hospital? What is that? It's such a different way of practicing. What happens to you and to women? And I'm sure you've had opposition because of the way you think. Nah, no problem.
Betty-Anne:
[39:28] I think I've had the most, well, I've had some really serious problems. The first serious problem actually I had was actually with midwives that had become institutionalized and new midwives who were trained in a place where they're more medical, thinking that, especially up here in Eastern Ontario. When we first went to legislation, a lot of the midwives, I had actually either trained or we were working together. They had been my apprentices or we were developing midwifery together. And we had developed a kind of way of thinking, I think that was quite legitimately both scientific but also quite intuitive. And we were doing a lot of home births. In places like Mississauga, near Toronto, they were doing more like 5% or 10% home births, so we had a different crowd up here in Ottawa. Actually, when we went to the hearings that they had for legislating midwives,
Betty-Anne:
[40:34] All the rebellious midwives were the ones who came to talk in Eastern Ontario, laid it on the line. One of the things we were concerned about actually was institutionalizing and having a university education. We had some concerns about that because we felt that it was going to take away from the community sense of whom we are and create people that are interested in just going into the university and having a career, which is back to that whole concern I had called from calling to career
Betty-Anne:
[41:06] Like if you are going to go into this because you think this is a good career and you're going to make a lot of money as soon as that happens it seems that people are going into it for the wrong reason so that's the thing that you always have to think about when you're becoming a midwife is why are you doing this because you're not going to be very happy if you think that this is a career where you're going to Either make a lot of money or you're going to, well, people are making pretty, you know, got a pretty good career right now in Ontario, but it's not just exactly what you might think it is.
Mel:
[41:43] Can you explain what, firstly, what your definition of a rebellious midwife would be? And then...
Betty-Anne:
[41:51] That's your term. I love it. I know, that's my convergence.
Mel:
[41:54] Well, the rebellious midwives, my thinking about rebellious midwives, I think a rebellious midwife is a midwife who is woman-centric, so thinks about what the woman wants over her workplace or what the midwife wants. And I feel like a rebellious midwife is evidence-based, understands the evidence, but also is able to work within the desires of the woman. And lots of people would say oh well that's what the maternity care system aspires to be but, I don't think that the maternity care system is woman-centred or evidence-based. So when I describe a rebellious midwife as somebody who's evidence-based and woman-centred, it surprises people because they're like, oh, hang on a second. I thought that's what the system was supposed to be. But I think the maternity care system is system-centric, policy and process focused and acts out of culture and experience rather than evidence or even just what women need. So that's what I think a rebellious midwife is.
Betty-Anne:
[43:06] I think that all professions need their idealists. Any good respecting profession needs its idealists. Midwives happen to be idealists because they are always fighting against the system that is trying to medicalize birth. We've always had that branch. That's our mission. But I happen to have some very, very good friends in the medical profession, and one of them is Andre Lalonde, who was my boss when I worked at Figo. I made a decision when I had been legislated for about 10 years, that I wanted to, 10 or 12, that I wanted to understand how these men think.
Betty-Anne:
[43:55] And I applied for a job at the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, and my boss was Andre Lalonde. He hired me because I'd just been to Afghanistan, apparently. I didn't know that at the time. And it looked like I was working on, you know, the usual trying to change the world. But he also saw me present in Trinidad and Tobago at ICM when I stood up and I said, why are we trying to get, when I was worried about the third stage management, active management of third stage labor. And I stood up and I said, why are we trying to give women more and more drugs when really what they need is the good food, they need proper care, they need a place where they can live, and poverty is really one of the problems that we're dealing with here. Why are we just pushing drugs on them? And he thought at that moment, he wanted to hire me to run his postpartum hemorrhage program.
Betty-Anne:
[45:00] What's wrong with this picture? But it had to do, I think, with the fact that he's a bit of a maverick himself. And what was really interesting is it was when I was working for him. Now, picture this, Canada, 2004. What's happening in 2004 in Canada? The term breach trial has just been exposed. And I'm sitting in the office, my SIGC office. I've been hired by Figo. I said, why are you hiring me? I don't really know why you're, I understand. I need to know why you're really hiring me. And they said that it was because they recognized that they were an old boys club and they needed to hire somebody who could help them understand women on the ground. That's what they said. And they said, we've never hired a midwife before. I went, what? And I said, they said, we kind of consider you our embryo. And I, you know, I wasn't in the job that long. And the reason I wasn't in the job that long was partly because we were having a hard time getting funding. But we had, what we had was we had projects in, it was something like 11 or 12 countries that,
Betty-Anne:
[46:11] One of the people from Britain said to me, Penny Ann, just be easy on these people because they don't realize, they've never worked with women on the ground before. Because I'm demanding that they go out and they get social activist groups together and that they have to work with those people or they're not going to be doing the right thing. So anyway, so here we go. 2004, back to this thing. I'm in my office. I get a call from Dorothy Shaw, who's becoming, she's Canadian. Bideon, she's at Women's in BC. She knows I tell this story because I asked her if I could do it in the Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier. And I said to her, Dorothy, no, so she said to me, she said, Bideon, have you heard about what's happened at the term breach trial? Meaning the tier follow-up had been published. And I said, I'm just getting snippets. And she said, she just kept saying to me, what have we done to women? What have we done to women?
Betty-Anne:
[47:11] And I felt she was, these are physicians who are wanting to do the right thing. They're like me. They're like you. They want to do the right thing. But we are all caught up in a messy system. Midwives are actually in a much easier system in many ways because we have ascribed to a profession that at least professes to offer informed choice to women. That's one of the main pillars of our profession as we developed it. The physicians are having a more difficult time because that's not necessarily—they are not trained by their profession to listen to what women say. They are trained by their profession to know and feel authoritative and dominate the way they deal with the situation because they feel that they're in charge. They always feel that they're in charge of the hospital, even though we all know it's the nurses in charge of the hospital. And it's just an odd power struggle.
Betty-Anne:
[48:12] So for me, when you ask me about what I think I should do to feel safe, I feel that there's a thing called a fear parameter. And that is, I just actually talked with Andre because we're planning this breach conference in Calgary in November. And I said to Andre, I said, can you just tell me what you really think we should be doing? Like, where you think we should be going? Can you just tell us why you think this has happened with breaches? Like, what is it that can change this? Why is it that some places they're doing breaches and other places they aren't? And he said, well, you know, first of all, he comes from Quebec. Quebec did not necessarily listen to the term breach trial, which was set in Toronto. There's always, as you might have heard, a little bit of a separation between les francophones et des anglophones. Je travaille Ă l'hĂ´pital Montfort. I work at a French hospital that really just puts everything on the table and talks about things in a very straightforward manner.
Betty-Anne:
[49:26] I find that the English hospitals are always talking about the committees. Well, we'll see what the committee says, and we might not have her on the committee. It's always this kind of way. It's a different way of approaching the world. It has to do with, well, we're professionals, and we're not going to talk about this in that way. Whereas the Frenchists put it on the table, and they say, okay. Like, for instance, when I started doing breeches, and I had this lovely man who was the head of obstetrics at our hospital, He said to me, well,
Betty-Anne:
[49:56] We're concerned about some of the things you're doing here. And I said, like, what? They said, well, the VBAC. And I said, well, the VBACs are not a contraindication in the SOGC guidelines. They said, they're not? And I said, yeah, go look at them. And they looked at me and said, oh, you're right. They said, why do we think it's a contraindication? I said, because in the old VBAC protocol, it was a contraindication. That's why you're putting that there. But a lot of this stuff, coming back to the fear element, I think a lot of what happens in our hospitals is that people are fearful. They're fearful of their jobs. They're fearful of their careers. They're fearful of something, of the major thing that might happen. And so I do a whole, like I've given whole hours on fear, asking people what really is they're afraid of, why they're afraid to do breaches, for instance. And I asked everyone in the room what their fear, the biggest fear is. And a lot of people, of course, say, well, I'm afraid of losing a baby. And it's not just the fear of losing the baby and losing their career or feeling badly among, you know, as a bad practitioner. but really feeling for the mother and for the baby, right? But one of the things that one of the OBs said in the room is he said, I think I'm fearful of being found out.
Betty-Anne:
[51:22] And it had to do with, I immediately identified with that. I know what he was saying. He was saying, I'm an obstetrician, and he's here learning from everybody in the room. And he is no longer in a power structure that puts him on top. And that's a really difficult thing for physicians to do. So the other thing for me and my hospital, and both hospitals that I have privileges to, hospitals in Ottawa, the physicians are really fearful that I'm not fearful enough.
Betty-Anne:
[51:58] They're afraid that I am going to do things that they would be too fearful to do. And one of those is just doing vaginal breaches, like just doing that. It's not just that I do them in the upright position It's that I do them at all And so somebody who's that fearful or not fearful enough, how can they possibly be trusted to be among us?
Betty-Anne:
[52:22] They're not fearful enough about what we find fearful. So I spend half my life helping people get over that fear. And part of it I do with statistics, right? And I do also with what's getting everybody together. Like in our room now, we have the pediatricians. At first, when I first started doing breeches, they wanted to have peds in the room.
Betty-Anne:
[52:47] Some places have found that pediatricians in the room sometimes are also very fearful, and they want to grab the baby before the baby needs to be grabbed. And they feel that they own the baby in the room. They don't feel that the mother still owns the baby, even though the baby might be having trouble. And with breeches, you really need to give them some time because they're just trying to get that blood back into that cord, which has been pinched because it's been sitting on the perineum and more pinched sometimes than a head-down baby. Everybody wants to grab. It's similar to NRP. I mean, I was very fearful when I first saw people doing resuscitation up here, because we'd have babies that were much more in trouble in Guatemala, and up here, they just grabbed them, they cut the cord, they throttled them with all kinds of instruments. And it was fearful for me to see that. So it's really something to understand when you, in your culture, if you've decided that this is the way you're going to do resuscitation, to step back and think about that golden hour and what that means to that baby or that mother.
Betty-Anne:
[54:09] So I guess the other piece, you know, for me was the association of period and period with psychology. That was a really effective thing for me. And when Thomas Fernie, who is from Toronto, who wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, and got together with some of the people in Europe and started looking at what we're doing to babies, that was a really important part of my sensibility to just bringing that in. So, I mean, I have been a midwife all my life, but I have always hung out in circles where I'm trying to access the people that are in power structures and trying to figure out how I can change those power structures because that's what we need to do.
Mel:
[54:56] I'm curious to know what does the future look like for you, Betty-Anne? You say you've got 20 more years, you feel, in you of fight left.
Betty-Anne:
[55:07] Oh, yeah, I got fights left. I'm not happy unless I'm in there working on some stitch that's come undone.
Mel:
[55:16] Uh-huh. What's the plan? 20 years. 20-year plan.
Betty-Anne:
[55:20] 20-year plan. Well, I'm just totally in love with the man that I've been with for 30 years. And he with me. And we are thinking about other things always. We have our concerns about the environment, our concerns about our grandchildren. We've got six grandchildren. It's really critical to see those children grow up in a place that's safe and in a place where they can open their minds. I feel that the future in Canada, for me, a lot of the things that I've been doing with Inuit and the First Nations people, the Indigenous people of Canada, they have opened all of our minds. They've been taking over a lot of the power structure here. They've been taking their place in our society in a stronger way than I've ever seen before. It's delightful. It's putting us all in our place. So you're asking what I'm doing 20 years now.
Mel:
[56:30] What's your 20 years going to be full of?
Betty-Anne:
[56:33] I want to make sure, I can't leave until I know there are enough midwives, a few mosquitoes here, there are enough midwives doing breeches. I want more midwives to have training to do breeches so they're feeling competent. I'm not doing that many breaches at home here because I have the ability to do it in hospital, and most women in Ottawa are more conservative, and they actually don't want it at home. They don't want a breach at home. And I was trained most of my life, even in Guatemala and various places, to transport a breach, not for a cesarean, just for other people who know how to do their breach better than they necessarily know how to do it if they've only done two or three at home. But what I'm finding is the midwives are too afraid to do it. The people that are picking up on it are the people that are the traditional birth attendants. We have a lot of them now in Ontario. I had no idea until I started teaching with Breach Without Borders. And I didn't know that I was, I thought I was going to train physicians and midwives. And I thought, oh, great, there's lots of people signing up for this course. And I found out 95% of them were people that are not in the system. Well, they're in a system, but a different system. In Alberta, almost 95% of the people who took the course were registered midwives.
Mel:
[57:56] All right, I have one final question. To the midwife who is listening to this episode, what would you want to tell them?
Betty-Anne:
[58:08] Be yourself. And don't let anybody tell you that whatever you're doing is totally wrong if you know in your heart that what you're doing is something you need to be doing as and i'd say as long as it's evidence-based but you know as well as i that the evidence becomes very skewed if there are people that are trying to do it in a way that isn't necessarily the best way to show the entire picture.
Mel:
[58:41] Betty-Anne, thank you so much for your wisdom. We could talk all day and we had quite a lengthy discussion before this one and I feel like I just cannot extract all of your wisdom in a short period of time but you will be at the Convergence of Rebellious Midwives in 2026 when we get to enjoy more of your wisdom and have more of your time and you're very good friends with Andrew who will also be there. It's going to be such a rich conference. And I can't wait to introduce the other rebels to you, Betty-Anne. So I appreciate your time and your wisdom and your energy. You know, maybe I've got 50 years left, not 30 years left.
Betty-Anne:
[59:22] Right. That's right. And Andrew is, yes, Andrew's been a good friend of ours for 20 years, I think. And we are bringing him here too because we are again he's another one of those people to me that has been very instrumental in doing things in a very understated way I had him do some interviews and he's He's so understated. He says the most profound things in the most quiet voice. And I'm like, hi, hi. Oh, my God. It's great to hear him. And I love to spend time with him. And you know, when we wrote this chapter, I don't know if you've ever told this before, but when we wrote the chapter, I had him write a chapter with me on breach for the Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier book. Chapter five is on breach and how to bring back breach and how to unshackle all of those things at your department. And it takes him a long time to get to things like that, to get back to me. So I decided I was going to go down. I flew down to Australia, and I went on and we did the final bit of the chapter in his male shed. I invaded.
Mel:
[1:00:40] You invaded his man shed?
Betty-Anne:
[1:00:42] Oh, it's called the man shed. Okay, not the male shed. It's like we're putting together the Canada goose, the stork from Europe. And I said to one of our midwives who's from Australia, Helen in Calgary, I said, what's the national bird? The kookaburra, of course. So we're going to have the Canada goose and the kookaburra and the stork all in one little logo for this conference, this breach conference.
Mel:
[1:01:13] Beautiful. Well, you know, for anyone who's out there listening, Betty-Anne has produced a lot of information, books, papers, all these things. So if you're on the podcast mailing list, you'll have access to the resource folder and I'm going to put all of the links and everything that Betty-Anne's ever done that I can ever find.
Betty-Anne:
[1:01:33] Oh, interesting. Great. I'd like to see that.
Mel:
[1:01:36] Oh, yes. I'll send it to you. But all the papers, I'll collate your life's work on a piece of paper, Betty-Anne.
Betty-Anne:
[1:01:43] Great. Great.
Mel:
[1:01:45] Well, we will see you in the next episode of the Great Birth Rebellion podcast. This has been Betty-Anne Daviss. She will be at The Convergence 2026. I encourage you to get your ticket and come and see her actually live because she's even better in real life.
Betty-Anne:
[1:01:59] Thank you. This is a great thing you're doing.
Mel:
[1:02:02] Oh, thank you. Wow. We're working hard and I just appreciate that. You know, we're trying to really extract as much wisdom from as many people as I possibly can and bring it into the digital age so that everyone who's listening can hear. To get access to the resources for each podcast episode, join the mailing list at melaniethemidwife.com. And to support the work of this podcast, wear the rebellion in the form of clothing and other merch at thegreatbirthrebellion.com. Follow me, Mel, @MelanietheMidwife on socials and the show @TheGreatBirthRebellion. All the details are in the show notes.
This transcript was produced by ai technology and may contain errors.
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