Nicole White, Certified Professional Midwife and founder of Birth Detroit, is committed to spreading the midwifery model of care to undeserved communities. With experience in over 500 births, Nicole is dedicated to building an empowered and informed community of families in Detroit.  Nicole’s core belief is that every mother deserves a healthy baby.

Here Nicole explains what midwives do and how they can be helpful during your pregnancy.

Hey, I’m Nicole White and I’m a midwife with Birth Detroit.

So a midwife is somebody that helps you with prenatal care and during your birth and postpartum. And what’s different between a doctor and a midwife is usually we work with women that are low risk and usually we spend a little more time talking about things like nutrition and your mental state and how fun it is to grow a baby and how hard it is to grow a baby. Basically we spend a lot of time with you, getting to know you and getting to know your baby.

And why I think having more midwifery care would help in this country is because right now when you go into your doctor’s office, you might only be there for 5 minutes and they don’t have a lot of time to spend talking to you about your aches and pains or what’s going on and you might have a question that you don’t feel like you have time ask. And that’s not the doctor’s fault, they only have a limited amount of time.

So what we are doing with Birth Detroit and with Sew Up the Safety Net (WIN Network: Detroit) is go in and spend more time with you so you can ask those questions. Because this is your baby, this is your body. So you have the right to ask questions and you have the right to explore and to get to know what’s happening inside and to get to know what the process is like because it’s actually something that can be quite beautiful. It can he hard, and it can be annoying, and it can be tiring, and you can be barfing, but it’s also kind of amazing that you are growing a baby inside.