A Letter To Strong Women Everywhere

Hello everyone, 

As we celebrate strong women everywhere this International Women’s Day, I wanted to take a moment to candidly share my motivations behind the Cincinnati Birthing Center with you. They’re deeply rooted in a passion for empowering women to grow.

When I decided I wanted to become a midwife I knew that maternal empowerment was of utmost importance to me. Backed by a passion to improve Ohio’s maternity care, that dream eventually evolved into a Birthing Center: a safe and comfortable environment for mothers and their families to grow. 

This passion originally sprouted from many experiences I had growing up as the fifth child in a family of fourteen. I had always been surrounded by babies and loved them and had a deep trust in a woman’s ability to birth and breastfeed. That trust was handed down to me from my mother, who always spoke about the normalcy of birth and openly breastfed. I am profoundly grateful to her for establishing this trust in the birthing process in me and my siblings. 

However, sSome of the experiences I had were not positive. My mother and father believed that a woman’s worth was connected to her ability to have children, stay at home, and raise a family. I saw how this caused us older daughters to take on responsibilities caring for our younger siblings beyond our capabilitiesy. My mother carried ahad a deep sense of shame for having her menstrual cycle. I decided to be different.

One experience I had at the end of high school particularly helped me. In 2010, I was visiting my sister during her second pregnancy when she quickly went into labor. I ended up catching her baby, proudly proclaiming, “It’s a baby!” From that moment forward, I knew I wanted to be a midwife.

Fast forward to 2014. As I finished midwifery school and was looking for a job, I was drawn to the midwest because I knew the midwest lags behind the rest of the US in maternal and child health outcomes. I saw a job opening here and quickly learned about the infant and maternal mortality crisis  in Cincinnati. I began to learn more about the racial disparities tied to maternal care in the Cincinnati community and was compelled to change them. In Cincinnati, black women are more than 2.5 times more likely to die of a pregnancy-related condition than white women. I created the Cincinnati Birthing Center to change that and to better the maternal care industry in Ohio and Kentucky. 

In 2014, I earned my CPM certification and have been practicing as a home birth midwife ever since. Three years later, I became certified as an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant. Now, I regularly volunteer as a teacher of community childbirth education classes for Life Forward, lobby for the grassroots organization Buckeye Birth Coalition, and am a founder of Ohio’s chapter of the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives. 

Most recently, I’ve been involved with legislative efforts to increase access to midwives and am actively serving on the Kentucky Midwives Advisory Council, which creates regulations for licensure of CPMs. In August 2020, I became the first Certified Professional Midwife to become licensed in the state of Kentucky.

Looking ahead, there is still a great deal of work to be done. My team is committed to empowering women with high-standard maternal care and resources, ensuring that both them and their families are safe and healthy. We may not know what the future of midwifery care looks like, but we’re determined to do our part to better it. 

For those reading this, thank you for coming along with us on this journey of growth. We’re so grateful to be backed by such a supportive community of powerful women.

From one strong woman to another,
Meghan