A nice chat with Midwife Gloria Lemay on Facebook.
We reminisced about Jeannine Parvati Baker and her glorious role in Family Centered Home Birth
https://www.facebook.com/share/uTbAFTwbe4UVGKeQ/?mibextid=WC7FNe
Here are a few comments I left on her postā¦
Jenny Hatch
I occasionally feel Jeannineās spirit around me.
She and Rico gave me the most wonderful Blessing Way before my fifth birth.
I wrote this on my Blog in 2005.
I just received an email from Laura Shanley informing me that Jeannine died yesterday.
Jeannine Parvati Baker has been a consistent and persistent voice in the Unassisted Childbirth or as she termed it, Freebirth world.
I was blessed to have Jeannine and Rico at My Blessing Way in 2002.
Rest in Peace Jeannineā¦.we will keep the light burning bright.
Jenny Hatch
They also gave the closing keynote at a conference I organized in 2001.
https://naturalfamilyblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/family-birth-conference/
Jenny Hatch How beautiful, thank you for this memory. I've tagged her daughter Lo Kat in this post so she can share with the family how Jeannine is loved and remembered by her colleagues in the birth world.
Gloria Lemay
I met Halley and Quinn when they came out to Colorado for the birth conference but I have never met the four oldest children.
Thanks for connecting me. I think of Jeannine often. Her books were a lifeline to me back in the day.
I hired her to be my āremoteā midwife in 2002.
I only ever called her once and that was to announce the birth of Ben.
She is the reason we had a Lotus Birth.
Jenny Hatch do you have a video of the closing keynote my mom gave?
Lo Kat
Lovely to cross paths with you!
Your mom and Rico gave this amazing closing keynote address.
Here is the playlist. I had to break it up into ten minute segments because of how You Tube used to function.
If you will scroll down the playlist you will see them!
Cheers!
Jenny
Jenny, that's amazing that you still have those presentations on the web. Thanks for making them available.
Gloria Lemay
Since no professionals make any money from Freebirth, their is no money available to organize conferences etc..
Lynn Griesemer organized the first conference with Marilyn Moran in 1998, and I organized this second conference in 2001 and paid for it to be filmed and streamed to the web.
Laura Shanley and I have talked about organizing more in person events, but we just donāt have the gumption to do it.
Thankfully the Free Birth Society and Indie Birth have stepped up with their mighty efforts and Family Birth is gently rumbling under the surface all over the world.
I like to think we had something to do with that!
Jenny Hatch of course you and the other pioneers of the freebirth movement have been instrumental. Where I live in British Columbia, Canada the movement has exploded due to the undemic, the medicalization of midwifery, the sky high cesarean rate, the sky high induction rate and the ability of families to network on the internet. More and more doulas have been trained and they are educating people on the possibility of taking birth back into the family. Thanks for laying the foundation of the movement.
Gloria Lemay
I truly give Jeannine and Marilyn Moran the full credit as the God Mothers to the Family Birth conception!
If I contributed anything, I believe the most important was my attempt to heckle the media into covering us.
When Lauraās epic book Unassisted Childbirth came out in 1994, only Joan Rivers wanted her on her talk show.
The higher ups said hell no and for six long years there was radio silence in the media.
I sent a press release about our conference in 2001 to our local Daily Camera newspaper and heckled them for ignoring us.
Lisa Marshall interviewed me and wrote an excellent article about Lauraās book and the conference.
I then went and bought ten copies of that newspaper, cut out all of the articles and snail mailed them to the New York Times, WaPo, and several more media companies with a cover letter calling them a bunch of chickens (bawk bawk bawk) and what do you know?
A few weeks later the NYTās interviewed Laura Shanley and WaPo interviewed Lynn Griesemer.
I always believed it was better for us to have the media spread the good news of Freebirth, even if it was a hit job.
I went over to Lauraās house to watch the 20/20 interview with her and David. We threw popcorn at the tv when Dr. Amy came on the screen.
Anyone else notice that her Skeptical OB blog is DEAD?
Anyway, after the big stories in the Times and Washington Post, the floodgates opened and all sorts of media companies from all over the world made documentaries and did interviews.
It was GLORIOUS!
I assigned myself online resident pit bull of the movement and pushed back any time anyone messed with our beautiful couples and their wonderful babes.
God Bless YOU for your clarity for all of these many years.
At the end of the day it is not about us, it is about the children and their parents having medical sovereignty.
Love, Jen