Betty-Anne Daviss travels the world training healthcare providers in vaginal breech birth, which often isn’t attempted when a baby is breech, or feetfirst.
Share on Pinterest
Midwives are growing in popularity but still largely misunderstood. This three-part series aims to help you answer the question: What’s a midwife and is one right for me?
In her early 20s, Betty-Anne Daviss was a naturopath hitchhiking across Central America. But in 1976, the trajectory of her career changed.
A major earthquake leveled many of the homes in the Guatemalan village she was living in at the time, which caused several pregnant women to go into labor early.
“I had to learn how to pack a horse and go out to the villages and find out what was going on,” she tells Healthline. “Every time I arrived, people would run up to me and ask, ‘Are you a midwife?’ and I’d say no, but I can help.”
Thus, the earliest of her midwifery training began.
Daviss spent four years in Guatemala, working alongside local midwives to learn their practices. From there, she spent some time in rural Alabama assisting low-income pregnant women who couldn’t afford a doctor before she came to Ottawa, Ontario, in the early ’80s.
She eventually started her own midwifery practice, though it would be several years before her profession was recognized and regulated by the Canadian government.
Learn more about midwifery in the United States here.
In the 40 years since she attended her first birth in Central America, Daviss has traveled all over the world — from the Northwest Territories in Canada to Germany to Afghanistan — to study, among other things, childbearing practices.
Aside from her unique journey to becoming a midwife, what sets Daviss apart from many other healthcare providers who specialize in childbirth is her expertise in vaginal breech birth. That means delivering a baby that’s feet- or bottom-first instead of headfirst vaginally instead of by cesarean delivery, commonly known as C-section.
In fact, Daviss has made it her mission to mainstream vaginal breech birth again
In some ways, Daviss, who also teaches in the women and gender studies department at the University of Carleton in Ottawa, might be considered a bit of a radical.
Last year, she helped publish a study that found there were significant benefits to a woman giving birth to a breech baby in an upright position — kneeling, on hands and knees, or standing —compared to lying on her back.
“We know now from the studies we’ve done that the pelvis is dynamic, and the baby winds its way through as the pelvis changes shape. How is it that we ended up with women flat on their backs and people actually thinking that was normal?” Daviss muses. “That’s totally an abnormal way to have a baby.”
Daviss is the only midwife in Canada that, in a hospital setting, isn’t required to transfer breech births to obstetrics. Images via Alexi Hobbs
The fear around breech births
When a woman presents with a breech pregnancy, which happens in 3 to 4 percent of full-term births, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends that her healthcare provider attempt to manually turn the baby in utero whenever possible by a process called an external cephalic version. This places the baby’s head down for delivery.
If that doesn’t work, ACOG determined in 2006 that the decision on whether to do a cesarean delivery or vaginal breech delivery should depend on the experience of the provider.
The Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada has a similar position on practitioner skills and experience.
ACOG also notes: “Cesarean delivery will be the preferred mode of delivery for most physicians because of the diminishing expertise in vaginal breech delivery.”
Or, as the American Pregnancy Association puts it: “Most health care providers do not believe in attempting a vaginal delivery for a breech position.”
Daviss gives her patients information on what to expect before, during, and after birth. She’s also working to educate physicians on vaginal breech deliveries.
For decades, the standard of care for breech babies has been cesarean delivery, commonly known as C-section, thanks in part to the findings of an earlier study known as the Term Breech Trial.
Spearheaded by researchers from the University of Toronto, the randomized controlled trial looked at the outcomes, focusing on maternal and baby death and morbidity, of more than 2,000 women with breech pregnancies in 26 countries between 1997 and 2000.
According to the data, breech babies who were delivered by planned cesarean delivery had a better chance at survival than those delivered by planned vaginal delivery. They reported serious newborn morbidity in 3.8 percent of babies who were delivered vaginally versus 1.4 percent of the infants who were delivered by C-section.
But in the years since that study was fast-tracked to publication, a number of critics, including Daviss, have raised concerns about its validity
“It was one of the major things that put a nail in the coffin of doing breech births around the world,” Daviss says. “It wasn’t just in North America. It was also in South America, Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand — it was terrible.”
One expert wrote in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that based on a number of factors, including “serious questions concerning the overall adherence to the inclusion criteria,” the “original term breech trial recommendations should be withdrawn.”
For example, the protocol was only supposed to include mothers pregnant with single fetuses; however, there were two sets of twins in the 16 cases of perinatal death in the study.
One of the concerns with delivering a breech baby is that its head will get trapped as it makes its way down the birth canal. Daviss says breech births tend to be more difficult because they require more maneuvers.
“Because the head is the last thing to come out, there’s a concern that the baby’s going to take their breath on later, and they do, they often do, but it doesn’t mean we have higher mortality rates with vaginal compared to cesarean breech births,” she says. “[Higher mortality rates don’t] seem to be true in places with good protocols and experienced staff… but there continues to be great fear around vaginal breech births.”
In fact, a 2006 study that focused on women in Belgium and France who presented with breech babies found rates of mortality or morbidity “did not differ significantly between the planned vaginal and cesarean delivery groups.”
Daviss says that another flaw with the Term Breech Trial is it didn’t adequately take into consideration the experience of the healthcare provider. It appeared that they were really trying to push the practitioner into doing more breeches than they were normally comfortable with, she says.
Instagram has become one of the largest social media websites which host a gigantic number of images and videos of 1 Billion active users across the globe. Most of us love to scroll Insta feeds all day and see beautiful snaps. But as they say, nothing is perfect hence there are certain limitations set by the official Instagram app.
Due to which we cannot download or save any videos directly from Instagram to our device. Hence people use different techniques like taking screenshots and cropping the image so as to forward it or save to their device. But still, they cannot manage to save the videos.