Lotus Midwifery

My only regret with having Rowen as my midwife was that I didn’t choose her from the start!
I started care with another midwife who I ended up not connecting well with and at 30 weeks we parted ways. It was a very stressful time and I was anxious about finding a good midwife so late in the game and having time to develop a close, trusting relationship before the birth. Rowen was all of that so much more. I really wish I had found her at the start as I would have loved to have shared my whole pregnancy with her.
Rowen is a very intelligent and caring person, and a with-​women midwife. She had complete respect for my point of view while also being able to educate and provide answers to any questions I had. She took the time to connect with me and really understand what I needed from her care and I couldn’t thank her more for that. I wanted my children very involved in prenatal care to prepare them for our homebirth and she did all my checks at home, at my request. Her willingness to support my desired model of care was evident in every appointment.
I ended up having some unusual health complications and Rowen was completely dedicated to furthering her knowledge and skills to support me through that. She is also very well established and connected in the bay area and was a wonderful resource in providing referrals for specialist treatment.
If everything goes right, Rowen is the midwife you want at your home birth as she’ll create the space just as you want for a wonderful, emotionally sensitive, safe birth. If everything goes wrong, Rowen is the midwife you want as she’ll be in there to bat for you, working alongside the many bay area practitioners she knows well. I felt my baby and I were safe with her support and care, at home or in case of transfer.

When I found out I was pregnant with my second child, I knew I wanted Rowen to be my midwife. She was my childbirth educator and doula for my first birth and was by far the best of all of the birthing professionals I worked with during that whole experience.
My entire prenatal, labor, and birth process was so different with Rowen. She practices a midwifery model of care that focuses on treating the mother as a capable and intelligent adult who is in charge of her own care, with the midwife there to provide expertise, information, and support. She was also fantastic about welcoming my husband and daughter into the pregnancy and birth process, and her standard visits are an hour so she can really check in with you about how things are going. Contrary to a lot of assumptions that a homebirth with a midwife is just for crazy fringe people who are anti medical science, I found after heavily researching all of my options that the model of care offered by Rowen and other midwives like her was by far the most evidence-​based available to me as a woman with a low risk pregnancy in my area.
Rowan wanted me to labor wherever and however I was the most comfortable, and she provides use of an inflatable birthing pool for women who want to labor or deliver in the water (I did both). My water broke early this time, and if I’d been in a hospital with practitioners insisting on unnecessary routine internal exams and/​or a policy of c-​secting at 24 hours, I would almost certainly have ended up being pressured or forced to have interventions that I didn’t have to have with Rowen, either unnecessarily or because of the higher risk of infection in hospitals. Rowen and her assisting midwife, Hope, just monitored my temperature, didn’t do any unneeded exams, and reassured me that I wasn’t on an arbitrary clock. Rowen helped me with positioning exercises to get labor going, and after 6 – 7 hours of real contractions, I had a very straightforward, safe delivery of a second little girl. My postpartum recovery was much easier, and the entire process, both clinically and in terms of my and my family’s experience, was just night and day compared to my first birth.
Rowen also works with a specialist who helps file and process insurance claims and has a great record of helping families get their insurance to cover all or part of Rowen’s fees, which are much cheaper than working with an obstetrician even though she spends significantly more time with her clients both prenatally and in labor. Ultimately, I can’t recommend Rowen highly enough.