student midwives
Your midwifery team at Freedom and the Seed believes in and supports the apprenticeship model for the training of future midwives. We believe that midwifery is an ancient art and “calling,” not just another professional career choice. Classroom learning with intermittent clinical experience would not equip a student properly for relating to clients with individual and unique needs. Apprenticeship is the absolute best model for teaching future midwives continuity of care for clients. Students see clients from the beginning of their pregnancies through birth and postpartum care. They learn to care about the individual, recognizing first-hand that what might be the “right” answer for one woman may not be for another.
We are very careful and selective about the students we choose to participate in our apprenticeship program. It is vital to us that our students share our values and are compatible with our personalities. For this reason, we hope that if you have hired us, you also will like our apprentices. Even though we are careful, we recognize that not every client always will be completely comfortable with every student, which is why we want you to know that you always come first. We encourage you to fill out occasional student evaluation forms which help both the student and our midwifery team know how they are doing and if there are aspects of their skills and/or training that need improvement.
Students always are supervised and they only are allowed to perform midwifery skills that they have been taught. We also only allow the students to interact with clients who are comfortable with them. If at any time you do not feel comfortable with our students, please let us know. It is very important that your needs are met first, and that you feel at ease with our entire staff.
Jennifer Hoeprich, Senior Apprentice Midwife
Jennifer has lived in Arizona since age five, and loves the desert nights. She has worked as a birth doula since 2005, serving close to 150 families in the Phoenix Metro Area, and has taught private childbirth education classes as well as public classes at Chandler Regional Medical Center. She has been working with Wendi as a homebirth midwifery apprentice since March of 2008, and has been a student of Marinah’s since 2005. Her biggest thrill in life—second only to her family and the birth of her son with a midwife in 2004—is helping women birth their babies. She feels that her role as midwife is to educate and empower moms in this momentous time; to encourage them to trust the wisdom that is wound in their DNA, helping to ensure that the process of birth unfolds in a safe place. She considers it a deep honor to share this sacred space with women as they birth.
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
-Maya Angelou
Sarah Nirmal Kaur Butterfly, Junior Apprentice Midwife
Sarah’s journey toward midwifery began at a very young age and she has known her whole life that someday she would be blessed to catch babies. Her mother was a homebirth midwife in Arizona decades ago and Sarah’s first memory of birth was at age four, watching her laughing momma birth her younger sister at home. Sarah believes that women hold the inherent power to birth successfully and she is a strong advocate for every woman’s right to choose her birth experience. Sarah has an academic background in Women and Gender Studies and Socio-Cultural Anthropology; she researches the ways in which governments and societies influence women’s health choices.