By KATHY GIBBONS
TRAVERSE CITY -- Area midwives are pushing a five-day event that brings a conference on medical and social childbirth issues together with an international film festival.
The Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) Traverse City will hold its 26th annual International Conference Oct. 16-19 at the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa. The "Push"-themed conference brings educators, researchers and health care providers from around the world together to participate in workshops, special events and presentations on topics related to mothering, home birth, pregnancy and midwifery. About 300-400 are expected to attend.
"The theme of our conference, 'Push' -- there's a lot that it means," said conference Chair and certified professional midwife Kathi Mulder. "Women have to push their babies out, not have them pulled out and sort of managed and directed.
"Women need to sort of take back birth, if you will, and be in charge of their own choices and their own care."
Mulder said women also have to push for change.
"With the current C-section in the U.S. being at about 33 percent, that's scandalous, and rising, unfortunately ... It's time to really get birth back into the hands of women, where it belongs," she said.
Meanwhile, the Motherbaby International Film Festival opens at the State Theatre downtown on Oct. 15. It runs through Oct. 17. The traveling festival offers a mix of films dedicated to pregnancy, birth and health care issues including actress and former talk show host Ricki Lake's documentary "The Business of Being Born."
The film, which Lake has said she made after experiencing two contrasting birth experiences with her own children, debuted at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Producer Lake and her film's director Abby Epstein are coming to Traverse City to participate in a "Wild Naked Ladies" free community panel at 4 p.m. Oct. 17. The two also will be honored at a Gala Book-Signing Benefit featuring more than 13 authors at the City Opera House at 7 p.m. that evening.
One of those authors is Carol Leonard, who was the first certified midwife in New Hampshire and whose new book called "Lady's Hands, Lion's Heart" came out this summer. For six years, Leonard ran a birthing center adjacent to her house.
"I could walk down the hall in my bathrobe and deliver a baby and go back to sleep," she said.
She successfully lobbied for legislation that mandates out-of-hospital births be covered by insurance in New Hampshire. Her book spans 13 years and is a memoir encompassing years spent apprenticing with a country doctor at home births, what she says is the renaissance of the profession of midwifery in the U.S. and her own experience giving birth, strapped down during delivery.
The film festival, which will be attended by about a dozen of the filmmakers whose works are being shown, is a fundraiser for a "Family Wisdom Conference" that will be held at Northwestern Michigan College in the spring. The annual conference focuses on parenting, birth and family issues, said Michelle Veliquette. She is co-executive director of the Traverse City Motherbaby Film Festival as well as an organizer of the Family Wisdom Conference, which attracted 300 attendees last year.
"We're really trying to get the message out there about natural birth and allowing women to feel empowered by this rather than some of the images we see about childbirth and how it can be horrible and scary and you have to have drugs to deal with it," Veliquette said. "All of these movies are going to be focusing on the power of women to give birth in their own way."
Giving birth her own way was what Caroline Schaefer-Hills, 34, of Traverse City had in mind after she became pregnant with her second child. When she had her first baby, son Finn, now 21/2, she planned on natural childbirth in the hospital assisted by a midwife. But her water broke prematurely, the baby was breech, and she never got a chance to go into labor. Instead, she wound up with a C-section.
"Once you are in a hospital things start cascading down the line with intervention," she said.
With her second child, Mulder served as midwife for a natural home birth. That meant Schaefer-Hills had a VBAC, or vaginal birth after Cesarean. While frequently historically discouraged by the medical community because of safety concerns, VBACS have been shown in some studies to be successful.
In Schaefer-Hills' case, it was. Daughter Beatrix was born healthy at home eight months ago, though Schaefer-Hills said her previous physicians "disowned" her after she indicated her intent to go that route.
Schaefer-Hills will sit on the "Wild Naked Ladies" panel during the film festival and is excited at the chance to share her contrasting birth experiences with those attending.
She's also excited about the film festival itself.
"I think it's great for Traverse City to have these filmmakers and films coming to our relatively small community in light of how nationally and globally important these films are," she said.
For a complete schedule of the Motherbaby International Film Festival films and showtimes, visit www.tcmiff.org or call 218-1181. Tickets to screenings are $8 for adults and $6 for children; family-friendly films at 10 a.m. Oct. 16 and 17 are free for children 6 and younger.
For more details on the midwives' conference, visit mana.org or call Mulder at 929-3563.
