Upper Peninsula Midwifery Services

08/13/2026

🌿 Welcoming Another Midwife to the U.P.! 🌿

I’m so pleased to welcome Fiona George, Midwife, who has recently relocated from Milwaukee and is now serving families throughout the Keweenaw Peninsula with full-scope midwifery care and planned home birth services.

Even more exciting is our commitment to work together to strengthen home birth care across the Upper Peninsula.

Families choosing home birth in the U.P. face challenges that are very different from those in more populated areas. Long travel distances, rural roads, unpredictable weather, and limited access to Labor & Delivery units all have to be considered when we talk about safe community birth.

That’s why collaboration matters.

Fiona and I are committed to working together, supporting one another as midwives, and engaging with our local hospitals, EMS agencies, healthcare providers, and other community resources. Our goal is to continue building stronger systems for consultation, collaboration, and transfer when they are needed—while protecting families’ ability to choose community-based midwifery care.

Home birth families deserve more than an individual midwife. They deserve a strong network of care around them.

Having another experienced midwife serving the Keweenaw is a wonderful step forward for families in the northern U.P., and I’m excited about what we can build together.

Please join me in welcoming Fiona George to our U.P. midwifery community! ❤️

Home birth midwifery offering prenatal visits, home birth services, and postpartum care for natural birth in Keweenaw County, Michigan

08/13/2026

Great turn out tonight in the Marquette office!
Lacy Anderson from U.P. Doula
Is teaching the Birth Partner Class tonight.

Love love love that many of our homebirth clients are getting great support through Lacy’s classes. It takes a village.
Always shocks me when I see practices that “do everything”

I’m the Midwife, and having
A TEAM means everything to me❤️

08/11/2026

Did you know that I provide midwifery care in The Keewenaw!

I come to Hancock 2 days a month and do routine care.

I get a kick out of crossing this bridge every time…. Never gets old 🥰

08/08/2026

🏡 THE SISU SUITE: A COMMUNITY BIRTH OPTION CLOSER TO HOSPITAL CARE

Living in the U.P. means distance is part of almost every healthcare decision.

For some families planning a home birth, that can mean living 30, 45, 60 minutes—or more—from a hospital.

The SISU Suite offers another option.

You can still receive individualized midwifery care and plan an out-of-hospital birth, while choosing to labor and birth in a dedicated space located closer to hospital resources if they become necessary.

This can be especially valuable for families who:

• Live a significant distance from the hospital
• Have concerns about winter roads or unpredictable weather
• Want a water birth or low-intervention environment
• Prefer community birth but feel uncomfortable with their distance from emergency services
• Want to remain under the care of their midwife without giving birth at home

The goal isn't to eliminate every risk—no birth setting can do that.

The goal is to give families more thoughtful choices about where they give birth.

That is one of the reasons we're creating the SISU Suite.

Community birth. Midwifery care. Closer to hospital resources when minutes matter.

08/07/2026

Something new is coming to Upper Peninsula Midwifery. 💛

Today was demo day, and seeing this space begin to transform made it all feel very real.

Coming this fall: The SISU Suite — a private, welcoming space created for families who want personalized midwifery care and a peaceful place to birth.

The name SISU reflects strength, courage, resilience, and determination — qualities that feel especially fitting for birth and for the families of the U.P.

There is still plenty of work ahead, but I’m so excited to share the progress as this vision becomes a reality.

Full-scope midwifery care. Home birth. The SISU Suite.
All rooted right here in ISHPEMING!

Stay tuned — I’ll be sharing the transformation along the way. ✨

08/06/2026

It's Time to Pay Attention. Your Healthcare Is Being Controlled Without Your Consent.

Most people believe their doctor or midwife decides what care they receive.

Increasingly, that's not true.

Insurance companies don't have to outlaw a service to take it away. They simply refuse to pay for it.

That's exactly how healthcare is changing.

If Medicaid decides it won't pay for certain services, even when those services are legal and provided by licensed professionals, it sends a message to every other insurance company: you don't have to cover them either.

Today it may be care after 42 weeks. Tomorrow it could be breech birth, twins, longer prenatal visits, postpartum home visits, or the very relationship-based care that makes community midwifery different.

This isn't just about midwives.

It's about who gets to decide your healthcare.

Should that decision belong to you and the licensed provider you've chosen? Or should it belong to an insurance executive who has never met you?

I'm angry because I have watched this happen before.

I participated in the California research examining barriers to Medicaid participation for community midwives. I also owned one of the birth centers that ultimately closed. I watched policies that were advertised as "expanding access" slowly erode the very care they claimed to support. Reimbursement failed to cover the actual cost of comprehensive midwifery care, administrative burdens grew, practices struggled, and families ultimately had fewer choices—not more.

Consumers should be outraged.

When insurance companies decide they won't pay for a legal service, they aren't just making an accounting decision, they are influencing what care is realistically available to families who rely on insurance.

Today it's Medicaid.

Tomorrow it's commercial insurance.

History has shown that payment policy often shapes what services are actually offered, because providers cannot sustainably provide care that is never reimbursed.

If we don't speak up now, we risk creating a system where your healthcare choices aren't determined by evidence, informed consent, or the law, but by what an insurance company is willing to pay for.

Healthcare belongs to patients.

Clinical decisions belong to patients and their licensed providers.

Insurance should support care, not dictate it.

If this concerns you, now is the time to pay attention, ask questions, and make your voice heard before these policies become the new normal.

07/25/2026

Every woman deserves the choice….

Every woman has the right to make an informed choice about where she gives birth—including at home, attended by a competent midwife.

On this , explore our updated statement on Home Birth. Evidence shows that for women at low risk, planned home birth offers comparable outcomes to hospital birth, with lower rates of unnecessary intervention and higher satisfaction. Midwives are skilled at supporting physiological birth. Women deserve autonomy and choice.

But in many places, legal barriers and regulatory restrictions make it nearly impossible.

Read more at: https://zurl.co/S1U3i

07/17/2026

If you’re concerned about the current produce situation and how this might affect you and baby….