Hi I’m Karly, let me introduce myself!
So many midwives feel a distinct moment calling them to birth work. Me? My path was a little more subtle. It all started with my enormous family.
There was no escaping midwifery growing up in my house. I’m the 4th of 8 kids. The first 6 of us were born in the hospital but my mom gave birth to the 2 youngest in our living room with her midwife, Deanna, and hasn’t stopped raving about it since, so there was never a time I didn’t think every pregnant person wanted a home birth with a midwife. Heavily influenced as I was, I was trying to breastfeed my play-doh at the age of 4, was officially obsessed with babies by age 9 and at 17, when I was considering majoring in art or music, switched gears and decided to be a midwife at my mom’s casual suggestion. It just seemed to fit!
I dove head first into midwifery school shortly after turning 19, just after returning to the US from teaching English in Taiwan. If I wasn’t studying midwifery, I was spending my nights with my preceptors in awe, watching the magic of birth on repeat.
A lot has happened since I finished Midwifery School!
2004: I passed the NARM exam and became a Certified Professional Midwife
2004: I interned at the very busy birth center: Casa de Nacimiento in El Paso TX
2005: I moved to California and became licensed and started assisting with local midwives and at Best Start Birth Center
2008: I started my own home birth practice
2016: Finished a course in Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Course
2016: Became a Vaginal Steam Therapy Practitioner through Steamy Chick
2017: Started the Birth Kweens podcast with my friend Ali Feroah
2019: Launched Midwifery Finishing School– online classes for new midwives (worth 9 MEAC CEUs)
2020: Learned how to do Intrauterine Insemination (IUI)
Today: I offer my full range of services in San Diego County
What keeps me passionate about midwifery?
1: Constantly learning to provide better care to my amazing clients.
I love learning, expanding my skills and becoming better at what I do. I also love being able to provide care that I’m proud of because I know that is what my clients deserve. It is so rewarding to give thorough informed consent knowing that I’m reducing the chance of causing any trauma and increasing their confidence and power. If my clients walk away from my care understanding their body and its processes better, and feeling confident in their decisions then I feel like I’ve succeeded.
2: The desire to mentor new midwives and birth workers. Being a new midwife or birth worker is hard. We can work magic, hold space and save lives but we can also contribute to birth trauma for our clients and be uninformed without even knowing it, not to mention get completely overworked and burned out. Being autonomous practitioners is great but it also leaves us without much needed support, resources and guidance way too frequently. I hope the classes I offer will help to change that. Midwifery Finishing School: