Photo via Lucky Tomaszek
Lucky Tomaszek is a sex educator who now has her own business, Transitions Birth Services, specializing in home birth (or “community birth,” as many have switched the terminology to) as a midwife. She says the sex ed and midwife lines of work “are actually almost identical, they are just about people wanting to know that they are normal and OK.” She first started work as a doula while living in Des Moines in 1998. She moved to Milwaukee in 2000 and worked as a Midwife apprentice but other work in sex ed and her family occupied her time until she was ready to get licensed as a midwife. Her business is unique in Milwaukee in its outreach to the LGBTQ community.
Why did you decide to start this business—did you feel that there was a need to be filled?
The ability to access passionate supportive care that would understand the challenges I was living as a queer person was really illuminated for me all the time in my sex ed work talking to people that were struggling to get a diagnosis or a treatment or just health insurance. I started teaching LGBTQ inclusive classes for community and professional groups as a way to be like “here is how not to be a jerk,” that is basically what those classes are.
In 2016 I felt really strongly that I need to get back to Midwifery—I needed to get that license I’d put off for so long and I really wanted to be able to focus my work on working with the queer and trans community in the Milwaukee area-- no one else here is doing this right now, not as a midwife. There are doulas who are queer and queer inclusive for sure, but there are no other midwives who are actively doing outreach to the queer community and as a queer woman myself, I feel really connected to those people, like family with them. This is the wrong word but almost protective in a mom bear kind of “I will give you care, I will make sure you are safe” way.
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I definitely have clients like from all communities and from all demographics, but my focus of specialty is really queer families who are working on expanding their own families.
Do you feel there are misconceptions about what a midwife does?
There are so many of them! Even people who contact me because they are sure they want to have a home birth have this idea that a midwife is going to come to their house all by herself, like just me with no supplies to receive the baby and leave again. That is not at all what we do. One thing that surprises some folks is that the prenatal care schedule is the same that you would get with an OBGYN. When you are pregnant, you see a doctor like every four weeks and then when you are further along, every two weeks, and then at the end, once a week. I do that same exact schedule. We are actually allowed to run all of your lab work, I can order ultrasounds, and I do that on the same schedule that doctors do.
I go in during early labor and stay until the baby is a few hours old. I have benchmarks that have to happen before I leave—everybody needs to be healthy and safe, I do a full head-to-toe examination of the newborn to make sure that they are healthy before I go home. Then I go back to the house when they are 24 to 36 hours postpartum and do another check-up, then I’m back at three to five days postpartum and at two, four, and six weeks. If someone develops a risk factor that makes it not safe to have a home birth, I am happy to help them get appropriate medical care because that is the safest thing to do.
I am a licensed midwife—my training was intense and the board exam that I had to sit is intense. There’s a high number of CEUs I have to complete every year to stay certified and we have a Midwifery oversight board through the state that regulates us and make sure that we are all doing what we are supposed to and if people have had an unsatisfactory experience, they report us to that board.
People often think that I just show up and all I bring is my heart and my hands and I definitely bring that, but I also bring an oxygen tank, resuscitation equipment and medication—my whole bag is full of safety and health care equipment. I think there is still this kind of image of midwives in America as being backwoods renegades relying on their gumption to get it done—and it does take a lot of gumption, but we also have equipment that we use.
You can find Transitions Birth Services at transitionsbirthservices.com and on Facebook or Instagram.
