Kim Toevs is the co-founder of Maia Midwifery and Preconception Services in Berkeley, Calif., which has achieved national recognition by helping thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered individuals with every aspect of creating a family. She now lives in Portland, Ore., where she works in the field of HIV prevention and public health.
From the Introduction
In autumn 1998, members of the childbirth preparation class we teach were meeting over a potluck dinner for their final session. Everyone was taking a moment to reflect back on the nine achey and exciting months of their pregnancies, and on the long personal journeys that had brought them all here. They were all wondering how birth could be "just the beginning" when it seemed they had already come so far. Kate and T.L. were due sooner than the rest of their classmates and were thinking a little further ahead. Out of the blue, Kate asked us, "Would the two of you consider expanding your book to cover not just conception, but all the other stuff about pregnancy and birth we talked about in class?" Everybody laughed. "Our book" was an in-joke among our clients, friends, and colleagues, because at that point we hadn't yet committed to writing a book based on our work. Apparently, we were the only ones who seemed unsure that such a book was in our future.
We met Kate and T.L. in 1996 at a community forum we facilitated for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people considering parenthood.
In 1997 they came to us for preconception counseling, discussing with us sperm-bank options, how to track fertility signs, and how to do a hundred other things you might need to do if you wanted to get pregnant but didn't have a male partner who is fertile. They told us then that it would be really convenient to have a book that covered all the topics we discussed in the counseling sessions, and asked us if we'd ever thought about writing one. We'd heard that often, actually, as we did community presentations and saw an increasing number of queer clients in our private preconception and midwifery practice. People were always asking us for the book where we found the information we were giving out. "There isn't one yet," was our reply. "Then write it!" we'd hear. But our work lives and family lives were so full, and we had never undertaken a project as big and complicated as a book.
By the beginning of 1998 we were helping Kate and T.L. get pregnant by performing at-home intrauterine inseminations for them. We shared with them the joys of their pregnancy, watched as they grew their baby, and provided them with prenatal care. Little did we know, even in 1998, how close we were getting to writing the book everyone said we should write.
We started Maia Midwifery and Preconception Services only four years earlier, in 1994. We offered a full range of traditional home-birth midwifery services as well as counseling for lesbian and bisexual women who wanted to start a family. Initially much of what we told these women about increasing their fertility came from our traditional midwifery training in herbs, diet, and fertility awareness. We also shared insights based on our own personal experiences as queer moms.
Mostly, though, we simply listened and tried to apply what we knew to individual situations. We heard many different stories and came to appreciate the incredibly wide range of women's conception experiences. While we expanded our understanding of the field through our own research and consulting, we had the honor of learning a tremendous amount from our clients.
Since 1994 we've constantly incorporated what we learn, as we've continued to expand our services in response to our community's needs. For two years we ran the gay parenting program at the nation's only lesbian health clinic. Through Maia we now teach classes on insemination and run support groups for pregnant and new moms, single moms, nonbiological moms, and for people who've been trying unsuccessfully to conceive. We teach childbirth preparation classes for queer women and also provide in-home insemination services. We continue to offer fertility and infertility care to the lesbian and bisexual community. After the first year and a half of focusing on queer women's parenting issues, we began to train other health care and mental health professionals to provide culturally sensitive care to lesbian and bisexual women and their families.
In 1998 Kate and T.L. finally had their baby. They, and a lot of other people in our lives, eventually persuaded us that it was time for us to write our book, the book that would contain the wisdom we had gathered from our community. We made the commitment to write it, and Alyson Publications made the commitment to publish it. This book is the greatest gift we know how to give queer women who want to be mothers.
