Meet Sarah Green | Certified Nurse Midwife & Mother

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sarah Green and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
How we come in to being and how we Birth are important. These moments in life are transformational and create the foundation to how we view ourselves as women, mothers, partners and sets the stage for how we grow as humans in physiologic, psycho-emotional and spiritual ways. As a midwife, I’m a guardian of the health and well-being of mothers and babies, of families. I stand as a witness to the awesomeness that is growing, birthing and caring for babies and believe with every fiber of my being that when a women or birthing person is fully supported and treated with the utmost respect and honor, she can move through this unfolding process with health and overall well being not only intact, but empowered, educated and confident—this makes for healthier babies, families, communities and world. We know that stress surrounding childbearing sets hormonal pathways for mother and baby that have long term consequences not only physically, but on an emotional level as well. Countless women have experienced trauma and helplessness during their pregnancies, births and postpartum periods which leads to issues of depression, rage, anxiety, which then has negative effects on babies and the family unit,. as a midwife, I work together with my clients to individualize their care to serve them in the way they need to be supported in profound ways. I stand for true informed consent and shared decision making and see my role as one of empowering women to trust themselves, learn about themselves and have full confidence in their intuition and capacity to do what their body wisely knows what to do and to help fill in any gaps that may appear in their support system. This is the work that changes the world. it truly affects the overall well-being of our communities when we start by respecting and treating women as sacred and honoring them. How incredible is it to come in to the world and be held in the arms of a mother who is present and able to form the deepest level of bonding with her baby? who feels confident in her ability to care for her children in part because she recognizes her own innate strength and profound knowing? Who can navigate the challenges of motherhood with confidence because she’s taken the reigns of her own health and well-being in her hands and been supported unconditionally in doing so? This is what heals individuals and communities and helps them thrive. I could go on and on about how the maternal environment during pregnancy, birth and first moments of life effect brain chemistry in profound ways, creating far reaching consequences for emotional and physical well-being for the rest of our lives. those of us who are called to this work see how these experiences effect families and communities and recognize the importance of protecting and honoring this space and promoting true wellness and healing. ‘How birth can change the Earth’ (not my original quote!)

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I run my own midwifery homebirth practice, which is to say I’m a primary healthcare provider for women during all walks of life including during pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum periods, I also work on lactation and the first month of newborn care. My work as a midwife is to support women in achieving and maintaining wellness through clinical expertise, informed consent and shared decision making. I’m excited to be part of the home birth community and to be supporting women and families choosing to be empowered in their experience to birth at home. I’ve worked in hospital and birth centers for several years and it was my dream to become a homebirth midwife that honors this most sacred and transformational experience of starting and growing a family but in supporting health and well being across the lifespan. I strove to create a practice that put to use all the skills and experiences i’ve gathered along the way in service to women, birthing people and their families- i’m proud to have realized that dream.

Getting here was not easy and has been a journey of about 13 years in the making, (perhaps even more!). I was born at home as were all my siblings, homebirth was a normal thing to me. The first birth I witnessed was the birth of my nephew when I was around 22, I was sure in that moment that I had been called to become a midwife. I was studying veterinary science at the time and switched majors to nursing, graduating with my Bachelors degree in Nursing in 2009. I started working as a nurse in labor & delivery and postpartum units with very high risk pregnancies and deliveries with the goal to learn as much as possible of what was outside of normal and how to manage high risk situations to help me better understand what normal looked like. Working in hospital was rewarding, but also frustrating as I saw how many women that came in to the hospital without any issues ended up receiving a cascade of interventions that created problems. I witnessed a lot of women being disempowered and dismissed, berated and belittled, particularly as the women I worked with at the time were often Spanish speaking immigrants and didn’t have much advocacy.

I run my own midwifery homebirth practice, which is to say I’m a primary healthcare provider for women during all walks of life including during pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum periods, I also work on lactation and the first month of newborn care. My work as a midwife is to support women in achieving and maintaining wellness through clinical expertise, informed consent and shared decision making. I’m excited to be part of the home birth community and to be supporting women and families choosing to be empowered in their experience to birth at home. I’ve worked in hospital and birth centers for several years and it was my dream to become a homebirth midwife that honors this most sacred and transformational experience of starting and growing a family but in supporting health and well being across the lifespan. I strove to create a practice that put to use all the skills and experiences i’ve gathered along the way in service to women, birthing people and their families- i’m proud to have realized that dream.

Getting here was not easy and has been a journey of about 13 years in the making, (perhaps even more!). I was born at home as were all my siblings, homebirth was a normal thing to me. The first birth I witnessed was the birth of my nephew when I was around 22, I was sure in that moment that I had been called to become a midwife. I was studying veterinary science at the time and switched majors to nursing, graduating with my Bachelors degree in Nursing in 2009. I started working as a nurse in labor & delivery and postpartum units with very high risk pregnancies and deliveries with the goal to learn as much as possible of what was outside of normal and how to manage high risk situations to help me better understand what normal looked like. Working in hospital was rewarding, but also frustrating as I saw how many women that came in to the hospital without any issues ended up receiving a cascade of interventions that created problems. I witnessed a lot of women being disempowered and dismissed, berated and put down, particularly as the women I worked with at the time were often Spanish speaking immigrants.

I’ve been fortunate to have very unique experiences in my journey to become a midwife and to have learned various skills and levels of understanding from so many incredible mentors over the years. At the same times I started working as a nurse, I was working as a midwife’s assistant at a birth center in Los Angeles. I served friends as their doula learning how to provide emotional and physical support during labor.
I later did an internship with a midwife in Santiago, Chile providing gynecologic, prenatal and postpartum care in a low resource clinic for women of low socioeconomic status and soon after moved to Chile. I lived there for about 3 years, studying placental medicine and studying with another indigenous midwife. While there I worked on refining my Spanish skills and working with a doula/yoga teacher with whom i created a combination of childbirth education courses and couples prenatal yoga. It was in Chile that I attended my first homebirth and began really supporting women preparing to birth outside the hospital system (cesarean rates and rates of obstetric violence were very high in Chile and many women were looking for other options, I happened to have the skills and experience to help support them in preparing for and having a natural, undisturbed labor and birth. I also worked in two different hospitals as a nurse in Santiago. After moving back to the USA, I left to Guatemala to work and study with indigenous Mayan midwives in Ciudad Vieja and Concepcion, learnign the art of Mayan abdominal massage and supporting birth in low resource areas. After several months in Guatemala, I returned home to complete my midwifery studies with Frontier Nursing University. While in the last half of my Masters Degree I became pregnancy and had my own homebirth. Completing my midwifery education, working and taking care of a new baby was very challenging! It gave me a whole new level of respect for what women and mothers are capable of. My partner and I had moved to Arizona when our daughter was about 8 months old in order to be closer to his son from a previous relationship and we were on our own without family or friends, which was another level of difficulty to cope with, additionally, our relationship was on the rocks! I was fortunate to have support from the midwife mentors I did my clinical work with and was able to quickly establish a support system and my partner and I had a lot of work to do to make it through a tenuous and precarious period of time in our relationship.

I worked at Babymoon Birth Center for several years before feeling the call to start my own practice. I left Babymoon about a year ago and since then have been building my practice and working from time to time at Yuma Regional Medical Center to fill in when they need a midwife.

Through the years of working as a nurse, doula and midwife in a variety of settings and countries with people off so many different backgrounds and experiences, I’ve learned how courageous women are, how determined and incredible they are and how truly important it is that we honor all women, children, families, all people. the very first place we can start in honoring ourselves in honoring how we come in to being. How we grow and bring life to the world matters, how we are supported through this process and beyond matters. When we remember that our lives are sacred and that this process of growing new life and birthing it in to being creates ripples that affect how we each feel about ourselves and those around us for a lifetime and how we develop as families and communities for better or worse, it becomes imperative to have nothing but the deepest level of humility and respect for the power of birth and those who do it.
When we struggle or suffer, are we held up, elevated and supported? Are we respected and empowered or have our will, our being and essence been stripped away and we are left feel powerless, out of control, helpless? We know that the experience of a pregnant person during pregnancy shapes the hormonal signatures that a baby is born with and has long reaching effects on their health over their lifetime. A mother in a stressful situation throughout pregnancy, or going through a traumatic experience in bringing her baby to the world tells the baby inside her that the world outside isn’t safe. Their nervous systems are more likely to sound alarms and raise cortisol levels that can cause someone to life in a perpetual state of fight or flight. If we can be gentle, respectful, careful, even in the most difficult of situations, we can improve the state a birthing person is in through a challenging time and help the baby inside have the best chance possible of starting out life feeling safe, secure, and able to bond and trust. Home birth isn’t for everyone, but midwifery care is. As midwives, we look at the whole person, their situation, what their needs are and how to best support them, even if that means a hospital birth with every intervention available. we can impact every person in our community by holding each other in the highest regard, starting with how we birth.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Great question, I love food and the outdoors, so first would be a local hike perhaps up on Piestewa peak, then brunch at Ocotillo or Otro Cafe, probably a visit to the Phoenix Children’s Museum (since all my besties have kids, too!) or maybe a visit to the Heard Museum or the Science Center. I’d also take them to see my office in Central Phoenix and perhaps stop for coffee at Song Bird cafe. If we have a long weekend, a trip to Sedona is a must. I don’t drink and my partner has been in recovery for over 17years, he’s an incredible yoga and meditation teacher, so going to one of his classes is always food for the soul. If it’s during the summer, maybe staying at a nice hotel in North Scottsdale with a pool to hang out at and enjoy the sun. The Uptown Farmer’s Market on Saturdays is another favorite!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Maribeth Diver, CNM was (is) my dear friend and incredible mentor along with other incredible midwives: Kimberly Flake, CNM, Kate Paxton, CNM, Mary Henderson CPM, Sue DiSilvestro, CPM, Morgan Burres& Che Phifer( both CPMs) have been unbelievably supportive to me in supporting my own homebirth practice, my friend and office mate, Shana Gorman-Dunn, DC (amazing chiropractor) and MOST of all, my incredible partner in life, Seva Simran Khalsa, LAc (also a very gifted healer), acupuncturist, meditation/yoga teacher) and our kids for all their support in the many late nights and early mornings I’m gone while with a laboring mama, my sister, parents and each and every family that trusts me to be the guardian of their health and well being In this journey.

Website: www.sacredwildmidwifery.com

Instagram: @sacredwildmidwife @sarahhelengreen

Facebook: Sacred Wild Midwifery Sarah H. Green