A labour of love
Birthing centre founders reflect on 25 years (and more) of supporting local parents
In January it will be 25 years since Marise Gosselin became the first mother to give birth at the birthing centre that now serves Sherbrooke and the surrounding area.
“My dossier was number 001,” she recalled, explaining that although she worked in the auto industry at the time, she responded to a newspaper ad taken out by local midwife Jeen Kirwen for a training course to be a midwife’s assistant and quickly became certain that she wanted to know more about the re-emerging world of midwifery care in Quebec.
“The stars were aligned,” she continued, noting that not long after signing up for the course she became pregnant and was able to take advantage of the care that she had spent time learning about.
In the end, Gosselin’s two boys, Raphael and Hubert were both born at the Maison de naissance, and although she never ended up assisting with any other births that experience opened her eyes to an approach to maternity and birthing care that she says is still often misunderstood decades later.
Jeen Kirwen, Jennie Stonier, and Lyne Castonguay were at the heart of the original pilot project for a birthing centre in the region, which got started five years before their profession was formally legalized in the province. Reached by The Record in the lead-up to an open house planned at the Maison de naissance de l’estrie this coming Sunday, each remarked in her own way at how that 25 year mark is really just one milestone on a road that stretches back much further.
“I was very, very involved,” Kirwen said, describing the 25 years she worked before the province wrote her profession into law as a “golden age” when midwives were free to be who they wanted to be. Despite the fact that the creation of a law meant a standardization of practices, though, the midwife said that “the legalization was an extreme joy for all of us, even though there were difficulties.”
Stonier, meanwhile, was working in northern Quebec as part of a movement to bring birth back to northern communities that dates back to 1986. At the time, she explained, roughly a generation and a half of Inuit women had lived through leaving their communities for as much as two months at a time to give birth, even though there was a historically strong tradition of midwifery care in the culture. Driven by a desire to bring that tradition back, the community reached out to people who were practicing home birth at the time to share their best practices.
“I went up there for a year,” Stonier said, “and it’s been 34 years since then.”
It was in bringing her then teenaged son south for cultural exposure that she shared the community birthing centre model with Kirwen and Castonguay, and got involved in the local pilot project.
Castonguay clarified that until 20 years ago, midwifery was in a legal grey zone.
“There was no law,” she said. “It was not illegal, but it was not legal either.”
While women were working as midwives, there was disagreement about the safety and legitimacy of nonclinical maternal care on the provincial level.
“One of the uniquenesses of our project in the Estrie is that we were the only community where teams of doctors actually signed written agreements to collaborate with us even though, at that time, the College des Medecins was sending letters to its members saying not to participate in these pilot projects,” she said, pointing out that pilot projects in other parts of the province failed because the community was not willing to get behind the initiative.
“There were a lot of people present and involved and willing to collaborate with us,” Castonguay said.
“We were very lucky,” Kirwen said, pointing out that women working in her field are present to support normal, uncomplicated births. “We’re not the last line,” she continued. “If I have a complication, I have to go to a doctor and she or he has to help.”
It took three tries for the local pilot project to get government support, with the successful proposal being hand-delivered by a delegation of community partners who all travelled together to Montreal to show their support.
“In the beginning it was extremely exciting,” Kirwen said, noting that the project was first located on Murray Street before it moved to its current location in Brompton.
“It’s like a family home,” she continued, explaining that part of the idea behind the birthing centre is to create a middle ground between the clinical environment of the hospital and home birth. She also shared that the centre creates a communal space where people can drop in and build relationship with one another.
“For me that’s the number one thing,” Kirwen said. “Midwifery is relationship.”
For all the work that went into establishing the centre and others like it across the province, and ensuring that people have access to the services of midwives, Kirwen said that she doesn’t feel totally satisfied.
“The minister legalized midwifery, but he didn’t take responsibility, in my opinion, to inform the public of what is a midwife. People still dont know,” she said, arguing that she still encounters people all the time who feel that having one’s pregnancy followed by a midwife is somehow more risky. “This is a big part that is still missing; the information to the general public.”
“Birth does not have to be this frightening event,” Stonier added, arguing that people in Quebec are very fortunate to have access to midwifery care and spaces where “normal birth” can take place
Despite their various concerns, however, the three founding partners all said that they are very pleased to see how far things have come.
“I’m proud of everything we’ve done,” Kirwen said, “and I think it’s a fantastic place.”