Yeah, all jokes aside it’s sort of an insult to refer to this as “midwifery” which is, in fact, a respected health care provider role that requires significant training and licensing.
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Wait a minute- this could be awesome
Just imagine- the kid is born, and the dolphin swoops in to see and CHOMP cuts the umbilical cord in the 2nd most badass way possible*. That’s a pretty awesome way to start a life.
- The most badass way to cut an umbilical cord is with a shark.
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CSB: I saw tim minchin a while ago in LA (has it been years? ) and who sat behind me? Hugh Laurie. It was a perfectly surreal evening.
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I like Random Caps. It makes me think I’m reading Winnie the Pooh
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I was surprised to learn that midwives are actually hired by (and work in) hospitals in Ireland. A friend of mine works as one there. It was very different from my North American experience of midwives.
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he is full of awesome
make sure you watch the one about the pope…
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What, you want John Sunflowerbeam64thcherokee to call himself a “life coach”?
Not for all the quinoa in Peru.
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a doulaphin, if you will.
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Probably not drowning. At least among water births done in a warm bath or hot tub, the baby doesn’t take its first breath until they feel air on their skin, presumably an evolutionary thing so the baby doesn’t accidentally try to breathe before they’re all the way out and choke on amniotic fluid.
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You would opt for the live version over the splendid animation ?
Also available as splendid book.
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Not so totally different. In the USA there are Nurse Midwives who can and often do work in hospitals, and Lay Midwives who you’d bring with you to a birth in a hospital but can’t work for the hospital directly.
Dolphin Midwives on the other hand, aren’t actually a thing anywhere except for someone who is pretty far disconnected from reality! 
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That’s a typo, it’s accurate with the errant “f” removed. Or remove them both to achieve a perfect statement.
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Perhaps I should have said my Canadian experience of midwives then. Nurse midwives might be a thing here, but I’ve never encountered it - all of our local hospitals here have their nurses in the birthing wards, but not specific nurse midwives (that I’m aware of). This is going off my experience of our 2 kids, and the 10 or so kids that friends and family have had in the last 5 years or so.
Yes, that seems a strange overlap of qualifications.
Wow. I must be tired. And new. I saw boingboing and my mind insisted it read Onion. Great Scott. These people are real. And they’ve procreated. I feel sorry for their baby. I feel sorry for US!
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i also live in canada, british columbia. most of the midwives here in Canada are Nurse Midwives, I believe that is actually a requirement to be a midwife in canada. Only a few larger hospitals with the more extensive birthing centers here have them on staff though, they typically work for their own business and you bring them with you to the hospital or to your home in the instance of a home birth.
Not really. It simply denotes a midwife with actual medical training and a degree in nursing with midwifery as a specialty. A Lay Midwife can be that old lady in your town that has helped deliver a bunch of babies, but has no specific training. It can be a bit confusing because, there are two lay midwifery schools in the usa, but graduates aren’t full nurses and don’t have any general medical training, only specific child birth assistance training, kinda like a doula.
There are some great famous Lay Midwives who are very well known, like Ina May Gaskin. Some Lay Midwives are top notch, and some Nurse Midwives aren’t that great…totally depends on the individual. They are just very different approaches on arriving at midwifery. Hopefully that makes sense I’m quite tired. cheers.
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Hrmm, that’s surprising to me. All of the midwives I’ve encountered here in Ontario (granted only a handful - we didn’t use one, a couple of our friends did for home births) were a bit on the… Woo side. To the Googles!
<5 minutes later>
Interesting. To become a midwife here, if you’re trained here, there are only three universities that offer 4 year midwifery programs. McMaster, Ryerson and Laurentian. McMaster’s, at least, looks to be a 4 year Bachelor of Health Sciences. Seems legit enough, includes a course on pharmacotherapy, so perhaps the midwives I encountered were simply more on the “woo” side despite their training. 
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I forgot to share this awesome but irrelevant fact:
The Nurse who helped deliver my son had the most awesome tattoo of a uterus on her tricep ever.
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Shaped charge, I’d say. Or maybe a magnifying glass focused thermal radiation from a thermonuclear fireball (no, Sun doesn’t count).
