Redding Midwifery: Providing Safe, Family-Centered Pregnancy and Childbirth Options

Our ultimate goal is to help you have a healthy, safe and rewarding birth experience,” says Naomi Bjorgan, LM, CPM, founder and owner of Redding Midwifery, a business which provides compassionate, personalized and evidence-based maternity care for healthy women choosing an out of hospital birth. “Our model of maternity care emphasizes a family centered approach to your pregnancy and birth,” Bjorgan says. This model of care is also heart-centered, informed by the education and life-experiences of Naomi, Mariah Van Dyke, LM, CPM and Deborah Landes, CNM, WHNP-BC, the midwives of Redding Midwifery.

A love of children, babies and birthing mothers

Naomi says she has always loved children and babies. Even as a young girl, she would rather have been in the nursery with the babies at church then in her age-appropriate Sunday school class. Her mother’s nursing texts inspired her to want to work in the birth world, originally as an OB. But during her time in university, she learned of doulas and was mentored by a wonderful doula in Vancouver, BC. She took doula training in 2000, and after seven years serving as a doula in Vancouver, she applied to a missions-based midwifery training which was affiliated with a U.S. program run out of Davao City, Philippines. Through this program she became a Certified Professional Midwife. She then applied for state licensure, first in Washington state in 2011 and then in California in 2016.

She moved to Redding in 2016 and opened Redding Midwifery and recently welcomed to the practice Mariah and Deborah, two experienced and highly trained midwives who share her belief in providing family-centered, evidenced-based care that comes from the heart.

The midwives of Redding Midwifery: (left to right) Mariah Van Dyke, LM; Deborah Landes, CNM, WHNP, BC, CPM; and Naomi Bjorgen, LM, CPM.

Empowering women, strengthening family bonds

Deborah, who says as a child she used her toy medical kit to “check out” her dolls for medical issues, knew from childhood that she wanted to help people to be healthy. She had her first child in a hospital setting and then was introduced to midwifery when she was expecting her second child. She decided to have a home birth with a certified nurse midwife and became friends with the midwife who later asked Deborah to apprentice with her for three years. Deborah continued her work in labor support while she raised and home-schooled her children. After her second born graduated from home school, Deborah went back to school and became an RN, and then a Certified Nurse Midwife and women’s health nurse practitioner.

Before moving to Redding, Deborah attended births as a CNM in a prominent Bay Area hospital, where she saw firsthand the benefits of the medical model of care practicing alongside the midwifery model of care which ultimately leads to optimal client care for moms and their families and a safer birthing community. “We get an opportunity to educate, build and strengthen families by giving them options about how they birth their babies, which builds stronger communities,” Deborah says with tears of joy in her eyes. “I can have all the letters behind my name, but my work comes from my heart.”

Expanding the midwifery model of care

Because of how much out of hospital birth has grown in Redding, the Vital Records office is now booked two months out for families to register babies’ births. Redding Midwifery has grown to meet this increased need. A significant part of expanding the practice of midwifery and offering birth options to local families is Naomi’s dedication to training apprentices.

Mariah Van Dyke was one such apprentice midwife. Born in Redding, Mariah worked overseas with Youth with a Mission; a Christian organization that leads international medical missions. Through this experience she learned about midwifery and why it is a successful model for childbirth all over the world. She found out that the US has the highest maternal mortality rate of all the developed nations and when she asked why, she learned that it was due to a lack of access to quality wholistic care during the prenatal period, birth and postpartum – the kind of care provided by the midwifery model that until recently had not been widely available in the U.S. This inspired her to enroll in midwifery school, with goal to help grow the midwifery community and expand women’s choices in the US.

Mariah saw Naomi on the news during COVID when many moms were changing their birth plans because they didn’t want to give birth in a hospital all alone, increasing the need for midwives. Mariah, already through her first year of midwifery school, called and asked if Naomi would take her on as an apprentice. She trained with Naomi, got her midwifery license and joined the practice on staff.

Safe, nurturing birth options

Redding Midwifery offers an alternative birth center, (ABC), located near Mercy Medical Center. Should a birth present complication, transfer to a hospital can occur within minutes.

“A lot of expectant mothers think they are high risk because they are over 35 or they’ve previously had a cesarean section, or they are obese or had a history of preeclampsia,” Naomi explains. “We offer these moms a scope of practice designed to keep them safe.” If at any point in the course of care they come across something that is outside of the range of normal, healthy and low risk, they do the appropriate lab work and refer clients for additional care. “But most women who think they are high risk find that when given the appropriate prenatal care through midwifery, they don’t experience the same issues they had previously, and they go on to have a perfectly normal birth without complications.”

As Mariah says, birth works best when its left alone, with the least amount of intervention, and Naomi adds that a large part of midwifery practice is knowing when to allow the birth process to proceed naturally and when to intervene.

To learn more about Redding Midwifery and the many healthy, safe birth options they offer, call (530)768-5051 or visit reddingmidwiferygroup.com.