The Trip Ahead

This September, I’m heading to the International Labour and Birth Research Conference in Berlin, Germany. It’s a three-day affair, and the programming reads like a love letter to everything I care about professionally:

Across three days, we explore how normal labour and birth can be enabled, protected, and sustained in contemporary maternity care.

Monday:

Reclaiming the Conditions for Normal Labour and Birth

Tuesday:

Protecting Normal Labour and Birth in Practice

Wednesday:

Sustaining Midwifery-Led Systems for Normal Labour and Birth

The programme brings together research on midwifery models, continuity, autonomy, respectful care, labour physiology, birth spaces, trauma-informed practice, induction, safety, workforce, education, and systems for midwifery-led care.

Doesn’t that sound magical? Well, it does to me, and probably to every other certified nurse midwife out there trying to balance evidence-based birthing, inductions of labor, rising health disparities, and poor maternal health outcomes with what is supposed to be “normal.” Normal, in today’s obstetric world, is something of a unicorn.

But the conference content isn’t my soapbox for this post—the journey is. Where are we going, what are we going to see, and who’s coming along for the ride?

The Crew

“Jam Jam,” my mom, and my youngest son are joining me on this one. We don’t yet know if it’s going to be great, but we’re hopeful. Here’s the plan.

We’re flying Delta—because it’s the best, obviously—straight from DTW to Berlin. This will be my first time flying into the city, so consider me equal parts excited and mildly out of my depth. We’ve got a layover in Amsterdam, and since I’ve flown through there before, I know exactly what we’re walking into.

Sidenote: I highly recommend flying into Amsterdam and spending a little time there if you get the chance. Customs is staffed by remarkably handsome folk who welcome you to the country, and the airport itself is refreshingly easy to navigate—a rare and wonderful thing.

Our flight is overnight, so by the time we touch down in Berlin, we should be more than ready to check into our Airbnb and start exploring.

The Itinerary

We’re arriving a few days before the conference starts, and that’s where the real fun begins.

Day 2: The Berlin Wall, followed by a stop at Checkpoint Charlie. This will be our history lesson for this portion of our trip.

Day 3 (Conference begins): Sessions during the day, then an evening Berlin sightseeing boat tour on the Spree to unwind and see the city from the water.

Day 4 (Conference): More sessions, and an open evening—so we’ll likely go hunting for a good dinner spot and see where the night takes us.

Day 5 (Conference): Final day of sessions, and then we hop an overnight train to Paris, France…

More on that leg of the adventure soon. For now, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that in a few weeks I’ll be swapping hospital scrubs for a passport, three days of midwifery research, and a very ambitious European itinerary. Wish us luck.