About Mindful Midwifery Presents: The Labor Behind Labor
From an outsider's perspective, midwifery sounds like a fascinating profession. But what does it feel like to juggle life's demands in a career that doesn't allow you to have a bad day? This is an insider's view of the labor behind labor.
Join Katie O'Brien, Certified Nurse Midwife, for frank conversations with frontline midwives about the joys, challenges, and politics surrounding the work of midwifery while trying to maintain a quality life away from the job.
Send us Fan Mail In this season finale, Katie reunites with Laurel and Lindsay — two of the OG guests from the very first episodes — for a conversation about what a year actually does to a person. They dig into where they were twelve months ago versus where they are now: professionally, personally, and everything in between. Laurel is leaning into what it means to be a content, healthy, soon-to-be 40-year-old (with a half-marathon on the horizon). Lindsay is navigating a huge family transitio...
17 May 2026
The Labor of Choosing a Hysterectomy: Carrie
Send us Fan Mail Carrie knows how bodies work. She's spent decades supporting women through some of their most vulnerable moments — and yet, nothing quite prepares you for becoming the patient yourself. In this episode, she joins Katie just two weeks after her hysterectomy to talk about the 30-year road to that operating table: the symptoms she managed, the decision she wrestled with, and the strange experience of knowing exactly what's happening to your body and still not having all the answ...
3 May 2026
From Undocumented to Nurse Midwife: Angela
Send us Fan Mail Angela came to the United States from Venezuela as an undocumented teenager, speaking just enough English to interpret for her grandmother in an ER — and somehow found herself captivated by the people rushing around in scrubs. It took a perceptive teacher, a husband who said, "we'll make it work," and one pivotal moment at a midwifery orientation to unlock a calling she didn't know she had. In this episode, Katie sits down with Angela — one of the few practicing Latina midwiv...
19 Apr 2026
Carrying for Others: Cori
Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Katie sits down with Cori — nurse-midwife, gestational carrier, and quite possibly the most interesting person you'll meet this week. Cori has spent her career advocating for better birth experiences after her own traumatic deliveries pushed her away from obstetrics and toward midwifery. But her story doesn't stop at the delivery room door. Cori opens up about the deeply personal decision to become a gestational carrier and what it's like to navigate that jou...
5 Apr 2026
Night Shifts and New Horizons: Holly
Send us Fan Mail Holly never set out to have a career. She wanted to be a wife and a mom — and for a long time, that's exactly what she was. But somewhere between homeschooling three kids, working night shifts as an L&D nurse, and her husband's quiet encouragement, she found herself in midwifery school. In this episode, Katie and Holly explore what happens when a person becomes someone new — and what that can cost. Holly opens up about the toll midwifery school took on her family, t...
22 Mar 2026
My Mentor, the Trailblazer: Kathy
Send us Fan Mail Before water births were trendy, before fathers were allowed in delivery rooms, before midwives could legally do a pelvic exam in Maryland — there was Kathy. the midwife who wouldn't be managed. In this episode, host Katie O'Brien interviews her mentor and the mentor of many other midwives in the Baltimore area: Kathy Slone. Kathy traces her career from an Indiana labor and delivery floor in 1968 to the halls of Johns Hopkins, where she negotiated her own sa...
8 Mar 2026
Still With Women: Beverly
Send us Fan Mail Taking a step back in your career isn't always a bad thing or an indicator of lack of commitment or drive. Sometimes it's just plain common sense and self-love. In this episode, Katie sits down with her self-described "introverted" colleague and friend, Bev — a woman whose career story is anything but quiet. After 23 years as a labor and delivery nurse, Bev made the bold decision in her 40s to pursue her master's degree and become a certified nurse-midwife. What followe...
22 Feb 2026
From Hospital Halls to Homebirth: Bayla
Send us Fan Mail Being a homebirth midwife is an all-encompassing, 24/7 career choice. Most homebirth services are offered by Certified Professional Midwives, but why don't more Certified Nurse Midwives offer homebirth services? In this episode, host Katie O'Brien sits down with her old colleague Bayla: CNM, serial entrepreneur, and one of a small group of nurse-midwives in the United States offering home birth services. What starts as a career retrospective quickly becomes a masterclas...
8 Feb 2026
Two New Beginnings: Jenna
Send us Fan Mail What happens when the midwife becomes the patient? Katie O'Brien sits down with Jenna — a newly minted midwife and an even newer mom — to find out. With 10-week-old Celeste in tow (and occasionally on the breast), Jenna unpacks what no clinical rotation could have prepared her for: the sheer, humbling, beautiful chaos of the postpartum fourth trimester. Turns out, knowing about postpartum swelling and C-section recovery is a lot different from living it. Knowing that cluster ...
25 Jan 2026
Midwifing the System: Hadja
Send us Fan Mail Not all midwives feel they were called to be a midwife! In this episode, Hadja traces her path from a double major in international studies and nursing to the delivery room, driven not by a "calling" but by a conviction: that midwifery is one of the most powerful tools for improving women's health outcomes worldwide. The conversation winds through career pivots taken on faith, the undervalued art of listening to patients, and why midwives — by nature — are quiet rebels who ca...
12 Jan 2026
Finding True North: Lindsay
Send us Fan Mail It's hard to be vulnerable, especially in the medical field, but if you can't show vulnerability at work are you in the right place for you to thrive? Katie and Lindsay explore the invisible weight midwives carry: constantly explaining who they are, practicing at the edge (or beyond) their intended scope, and soldiering through systems that don't always leave room for vulnerability. They get honest about burnout, the loss of clinical identity, the myth of work-life balance, a...
21 Dec 2025
Full Scope, Full Life: Carrie
Send us Fan Mail What if the best thing about being a midwife was that it wasn't the most important thing about you? That's the philosophy Carrie lives by — and in this episode, she unpacks what it really means to be present at birth without losing yourself to it. A lover of nature in all its forms, Carrie sees labor the way she sees storms and tides: wild, unpredictable, and never truly controllable. Which is exactly why she's still in awe of it after 20+ years. Katie and Carrie get refreshi...
4 Dec 2025
The Midwife Next Door: Laurel
Send us Fan Mail Midwife and podcast host Katie reconnects with longtime colleague and friend Laurel, a certified nurse midwife of 15+ years, to kick off the podcast series! Laurel stumbled into midwifery as a nursing student through a Women's Studies minor and a transformative clinical rotation at a birth center — where she witnessed birth as a joyful family event, not a medical procedure. That vision never left her. Her early career was marked by instability: a first job where midwives were...
4 Dec 2025
Intro to Mindful Midwifery Presents: The Labor Behind Labor
Send us Fan Mail What's this podcast about? Midwives, of course! Find out more in this introduction to the series.
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