Every Body Midwifery & Health Educators, Jaqxun Darlin, CPM, LDM, and Ray Rachlin, CLC are presenting at this year's Oregon Midwifery Council Portland Region Spring Conference 2016! We're joining a great line up of speakers on a range of midwifery topics. This conference is a great CEU opportunity for midwives. Click here to register for the conference. Read on for more info about our presentation.

Midwifery Care for Every Body

In this introductory level workshop, we explore how providing client-centered care for transgender and gender nonconforming clients improves and enhances the care we can provide for all families seeking midwifery care. Transgender spectrum individuals face many obstacles to healthcare access including a lack of knowledgeable care providers, other people’s lack of awareness of identity issues, and outright prejudice and discrimination. This leads to underutilization of healthcare by gender nonconforming people and contributes to health disparities and poor outcomes, especially by individuals with intersecting marginalized identities. As midwives and birth workers, we are in a unique position to offer culturally competent care to this client population. In this workshop, we will go over vocabulary and acronyms relevant to serving transgender clients, as well as ways to create facilitate gender-inclusive care through health history forms, informed choice discussions, and the ways we talk about midwifery, birth, and feeding newborns. We will share resources for further continuing education and learning. Finally, we will develop a collective understanding of these changes are beneficial to all of our clients, regardless of gender identity.

On behalf of the LGBTQ Health Coalition of the Columbia-Willamette, we are excited to invite you to the 2016 LGBTQ Meaningful Care Conference on Friday, March 25, 2016 at the Sheraton Airport Hotel in Portland, OR. As a day-long LGBTQ cultural competency training event for healthcare and social service professionals, the Meaningful Care Conference aims to promote LGBTQ cultural competency in health care and social services, share current best practice applications of LGBTQ cultural competency in health care and social services, and to develop and diversify networks of LGBTQ culturally competent health care and social service providers. Learn more and register here.

Trans Baby Boom! is a breakout session of the workshop, presented by Jaqxun Darlin, CPM, LDM, Midwife and Educator at Every Body Midwifery & Health, and Ray Rachlin, CLC, Educator at Every Body Midwifery and Health.