Today on the show I speak with radical registered midwife Sharon Robinson. Hailing from the US, Sharon tells us of her training in Brooklyn, New York and how she promptly left, and continued learning on the job, helping serve birthing women in Cambodia. Sharon now lives in New Zealand and is a local community midwife there, but it has not all has always been smooth sailing. She tells us how her registration was threatened and put on hold (unsurprisingly because she is a radical midwife) after some other midwifes reported her to the government bodies. This process for her was HUGE and she ended up leaving the small town where she was living due to the dramas and traumas it all caused. Sharon has recently returned to that district and is now happily continuing to serve the women in that community. Sharon is also known as a travelling midwife and has attended births as far afield as the Amazon Jungle in Peru! I really like Sharon. She is so real and raw and just generally a really good person with a big heart. I hope you see her big heart and her passion for serving women in this interview.
Sharron's Bio :
Sharon Robinson, originally from the US, trained as a midwife in Brooklyn, New York. She was a physical therapist when she had her own two birth children. It was after their births that she describes what felt like a spiritual awakening to what she believes is her authentic purpose, midwifery. Her clinical training was all done in 2 big city hospitals in the Bronx. While she was grateful for the education and experiences, she felt she was being groomed to be more of a physician's assistant than the midwife she had been called to be.
Since graduating in 2000, she has traveled extensively and supported women to birth in various countries around the world. Those countries include Cambodia, Tonga, New Zealand, Benin, Mexico and even the Amazon Jungle in Peru!
She is passionate about women holding the reigns for their own birthing journeys. She knows that “positive” birth outcomes most often occur when space is held for birth to unfold in the ways that Mother Nature has designed. She also knows that “good births” are important and can help women heal from previous traumatic births. She has often gone above and beyond routine guidelines and protocols to support those positive healing births to occur.
She is a strong advocate for homebirth realizing that most women have been culturally conditioned to believe that birthing in hospitals, even for “low-risk” women, is the “safest option.” She also realizes that the unfortunate truth is that routine hospital interventions, designed to avoid adverse outcomes caused by "risk factors," all too often end up sabotaging women’s own innate birthing wisdom, power and positive outcomes.
She says that when care providers and birthing women are saturated in the hormones of fear it leads to mostly “well-meaning” interventions that unfortunately, all too often, derail the process of normal physiological birth. Sharon is doing what she can, one sacred birth at a time, to welcome our new citizens of the world with the love and respect that, she believes, they all deserve.