When you hire a Registered Midwife, you are hiring a medical professional to manage your low-risk birth.
When you hire a traditional birth attendant, you are hiring a woman to support you during your normal, physiological birth process.
A traditional birth attendant supports birthing families in a way leaning towards how “midwives” practiced historically, before it became a regulated medical profession in many parts of the world. Traditionally, midwives were women in the community who provided community support during the normal process of birth.
When the term midwifery in many parts of Canada and other parts of the world became adopted by the medical field to mean a medical professional trained to manage low-risk births at home or in the hospital, those practicing in a more traditional way became harder to find, and were no longer allowed to call themselves “midwives” in the old sense of the word.
Although our culture has shifted the majority of births into the medical institution, attended by medical doctors and registered, medically trained midwives, not everyone wishes to have a medical approach to their birth.
Childbirth is a normal, physiological, healthy part of the reproductive life cycle. While medical professionals like doctors and registered midwives are trained to be managers of a childbirth, traditional birth attendants support the mother during her own, innate biological process of birth.
This post is meant to highlight a distinction between the two, not to create a divide, but to help people understand the difference. TBAs are NOT medical professionals, they are there to support a woman’s own process, while Registered Midwives ARE medical professionals, and by the Canadian Association of Midwives’ own definition are in place to manage low risk births. While certainly there can be an embracing on the part of modern Registered Midwives to integrate a more traditional approach into their work, it is inherently a different model than the community, non-medical model that midwifery was prior to medical regulation of midwives in many parts of the world.
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