Happy spring time everyone! As Victoria and I approach our five year anniversary of midwifing together this month, I want to take a moment to say hello and update you on some big changes at Refuge.

As many of you know, I had a baby in 2023. Victoria caught my kid on the toilet a few hours after midnight on New Year's Day. Parenthood has brought more love into my heart than I knew was possible, and it also made attending births and being the kind of midwife I needed to be exponentially harder.

I made it a little over two years postpartum before I reached the breaking point that so many other midwife parents hit — I couldn’t do both parenting and midwifery well at the same time, and I chose parenting.

What followed was a very tearful conversation with Victoria. To my delight (and surprise), Victoria wanted to continue attending births as a solo midwife — meaning Refuge families would continue to have their midwifery home after my retirement. We started to hatch a transition plan for our practice, and to give me some time away to regroup, recover, and spend uninterrupted time with my kid.

This fall Victoria and I started crafting our next steps for Refuge. We wanted to preserve our home for down to earth, evidenced-based homebirth and to continue helping folks get pregnant with IUI. But it was also time to revamp our education and community building initiatives.

I’ve been working to transform my passion projects into comprehensive offerings to help midwives, docs, and other providers to become well-equipped Queer & Trans centered fertility care providers like us.

After a few months of planning (and an incredible website redo, thank you Leah Moon) we’re launched and thriving. Victoria is catching babies with the help of our advanced student Natasha, I have taken the lead on caring for our fertility and IUI families, and our teaching offerings are launched!

This year I am offering my IUI provider training as a self paced class, and creating new continuing education content for Queer-centered fertility providers and everyone else who wants this knowledge in a quarterly Queer Fertility Masterclass series.

The next installment “Is Infertility Rising? And How Do Queer People Fit Into The Data?” is coming up online on Sunday April 12 and if that's of interest to you, I’d love to see you there. Please take 50% off with code: COMMUNITY.

We'll be back this spring for our practice gatherings, please mark your calendars for the next ones: Queer & Trans Families Meetup, Saturday April 11, 2–4pm @ Clark Park and Queer Birthworker Potluck, Thursday May 14, 6–8pm @ West Philly Wellness.

I’m grateful to you all for trusting Refuge over the last 9 years, and hope to connect with many of you in person at our potlucks or online in our new courses soon.

With Love,
Ray

11am EST, Sunday April 12, online, please take 50% off with code: COMMUNITY

Saturday April 11, 2–4pm @ Clark Park

Thursday May 14, 6–8pm @ West Philly Wellness