From Hospital Halls to Homebirth: Bayla

Send us Fan MailBeing a homebirth midwife is an all-encompassing, 24/7 career choice. Most homebirth services are offered by Certified Professional Midwives, but why don't more Certified Nurse Midwives offer homebirth services? In this episode, host Katie O'Brien sits down with her old colleague Bayla: CNM, serial entrepreneur, and one of a small group of nurse-midwives in the United States offering home birth services. What starts as a career retrospective quickly becomes a masterclass in everything nursing school doesn't teach you.Bayla has done it all — cloth diaper store, bookkeeping firm, four-midwife practice, solo home birth CNM — and she's doing most of it simultaneously. She talks candidly about why she left the hospital (spoiler: she had her own baby and sprinted home), why she stays in home birth (the relationships, the autonomy, the lack of someone looking over her shoulder), and why she's finally starting to pull back (the board of nursing called — multiple times).Along the way, the two dig into the state-by-state legal maze of home birth, the fraught reality of hospital transfers, the lost art of breech delivery, malpractice insurance that nearly hit $40K/year, and the gut-punch of going above and beyond for a patient who never speaks to you again.Equal parts inspiring and sobering — this one's for every midwife who's ever asked "why do I keep doing this?" and then answered their own question at 2 a.m. on the way to a birth.This episode pairs well with a chilled glass of moscato.