Supporting Birth in Challenging Situations

David Carter-Plake, LM, CPM began his career in Maternal and Child Health over 25 years ago working in hospital systems as a labor and delivery nurse. After completing disaster relief work in New Orleans and Haiti, David started searching for alternative ways to provide services to people in need of maternity care. Finally deciding on the traditional midwifery path instead of nurse midwifery, David attended Midwives College of Utah graduating with an Associate of Science in Midwifery degree in 2018 and will complete a Bachelor of Science of Midwifery in August 2019. David is planning on continuing his education at MCU in the graduate degree program with a focus on midwifery education. David lives in El Paso, Texas where he has a solo midwifery practice, Imagine Midwifery Services, providing birth center and home birth care to birthing people of El Paso, Southern New Mexico, Chihuahua, Mexico and beyond. David has 5 dogs and one 20-year-old cat. He enjoys reading, travel, movies, and watching the performing arts in his leisure time.

Betty-Anne Daviss MA, RM has been a midwife for 45 years on various continents, and a researcher in the social sciences and clinical epidemiology for 30. She cites learning from traditional midwives from Guatemala to Afghanistan as one of the highlights of her career. While acting as the project coordinator for the Safe Motherhood Initiative of FIGO in 2004, the follow-up to the Term Breech Trial was published and she switched focus to search across Europe for best breech practice. In 2009, she persuaded Andre Lalonde of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to bring Frank Louwen, from Frankfurt to the SOGC AGM to present on upright breech and helped organize several breech conferences in Ottawa, Washington D.C., and across Europe 2009-2019. She has provided lectures in China, India, Africa; and Latin America on Human Rights in Childbirth, using the return to breech as one model solution. Working between Ottawa and Frankfurt 2008-2016, she became the co-principal investigator and principal writer for the Frankfurt study comparing vaginal breeches born with the mothers upright vs on their backs (2017) and co-authored other articles with the Frankfurt team on twins and MRIs in the breech. In 2013 she introduced a new technique to retrieve the aftercoming head in the vaginal breech to avoid forceps. Her manual “Rethinking The Physiology of Vaginal Breech Birth,” describes vaginal breech history, new manoeuvres of upright breech, and the research to support them. She is the principal editor of a recently published book, Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier: Speaking Truth to Power, a colourful combined activist/academic treatise on social justice issues (2021).

Sarita Bennett, DO, grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in traditions that valued self-reliance and resourcefulness. After experiencing hospital birth in 1978, she began to understand why her elders had told her that birth belongs at home. Sarita began practicing midwifery in 1980 to provide the option she had been looking for in her community and couldn’t find. Her education was experiential and supplemented by any resource available. In 1994, she entered the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine and, upon graduating with honors, completed a community-based Family Medicine Residency, returned to her hometown in WV, and opened a Family Medicine clinic providing full-spectrum care. From 2013 - 2021, Dr. Bennett lived in the Charlottesville, VA, area where she trained midwifery and physician assistant students while providing care for home birth families and at her free-standing birth center. She is currently enjoying being retired, living back home in the mountains of WV, and watching the next chapter of life begin to unfold.

Stephanie Anne Berry, Clinical Herbalist, LM, CPM is a clinical herbalist and midwife. Her primary focus is to help women reclaim their health and reconnect to their bodies in every stage of the pregnancy journey. She teaches and consults with women about fertility and holistic health in pregnancy. After training with local herbalists, Aviva Romm, and Susun Weed, Stephanie has 10+ years sharing herbal medicine with women and children. After herb school, she trained as a midwife in order to elevate and introduce holistic medicine to new families. Her goal is to bridge the gap between the allopathic model and nature-based medicine. She co-founded CALYX Wellness Studio, a collaborative healing space for professionals, to share resources and work as a team to offer integrative care plans from a multi-modality perspective. Her herb and midwifery practice is active, vital, and ever-growing to find new ways to support health now and for future generations.

Karen H. Strange is a Certified Professional Midwife (1996), American Academy of Pediatrics/Neonatal Resuscitation Program Instructor (1992).

She is founder of the Integrative Resuscitation of the Newborn workshop, which includes the physiology of newborn transition. She teaches the “when, why and how” of helping newborns that are either not breathing or not breathing well, with incredible clarity. She helps the provider have a sense of what the baby is experiencing which leads to a more appropriate response to newborns in need. Karen has done over 900+ hours of debrief/case reviews regarding resuscitation. She is an international speaker and has taught over 9,000 people worldwide. There are many neonatal resuscitation instructors but Karen teaches practical neonatal resuscitation, regardless of the place of birth. And her teachings instill a strong sense of confidence and competence in providers, so they can respond in the least traumatic way.