Midwife Christina Winton and Doula Jaimee Hunter Serve Mothers and Babies Throughout the Ark-La-Tex
By Ellen Orr

Jaimee Hunter, a certified labor doula, came to her calling later in life. After earning multiple degrees and establishing successful careers in first marketing and then public education, her life changed when she happened to attend her sister-in-law’s midwife-supported delivery. A natural caregiver, Jaimee poured love and attention onto her sister-in-law as she labored. After a healthy birth, the midwife asked Jaimee if she was a doula.

“I didn’t know anything about doulas—had never even heard the word,” Jaimee recalled.

She was not alone; many Americans are unsure about the roles of various birth workers, such as doulas and midwives. Doulas are service professionals who provide educational, emotional, and physical support to pregnant people before, during, and briefly after delivery—both for hospital and non-hospital births. Midwives, meanwhile, are educated healthcare providers with expertise in uncomplicated or low-risk OB-GYN care. They offer prenatal, delivery, and postpartum care. While some midwives have privileges at hospitals, many only serve individuals and families interested in birthing at home or in a birthing center.

***Each home birth looks different, explained Christina and Jaimee. While some mothers prefer to labor in bed, water birth is an extremely popular choice.***

After Jaimee recovered from the whirlwind of her nephew’s birth, she got online to research doulas. Immediately, she knew in her gut that she had stumbled upon her life’s next chapter. With her husband urging her to enter a profession that “loved [her] as much as [she] loved it,” Jaimee left teaching and embarked on a new chapter.

In contrast to latecomer Jaimee, certified professional midwife (CPM) Christina Winton has known since she was a teenager that birth work was the vocation for her. Attending high school in the Pacific Northwest, she was surrounded by birth workers and women who had given birth using midwives. “I was seeing and hearing their stories, hearing how they were treated and their bodies were respected,” she recalled.

However, Christina did not pursue her midwifery education immediately, instead getting married becoming pregnant with twins, whom she delivered in a hospital with an OB-GYN, where Christina’s desires were not respected. “I realized through that [experience] that, absolutely, for sure, I was going to be a midwife—because of the lack of bodily autonomy I was given, because of the choices that were taken out of my hands because of protocols,” she explained. “I was like, ‘Somebody needs to make this better. This can be better.’”

Certified professional midwifery, which requires years of academic study and apprenticeship followed by formal certification, was not immediately available to Christina as a career route, given that she was raising children while her husband was deployed overseas. She instead worked only as a doula until 2013, when her husband retired from the marine corps and the family relocated to DeQueen, Arkansas. She was finally positioned to pursue midwifery education. Four years of schooling, eight years of apprenticeship (completed partly concurrently with her schooling), and state- and national-level board certification exams later, she became licensed in 2020.

“Our clients become our family, our sisters. It is a sisterhood of motherhood.”

— Jaimee Hunter

Since then, Jaimee and Christina have worked together as the only doula-midwife pair in the Ark-La-Tex. Prior to their professional partnership, Jaimee and Christina became friends, bonding quickly over their shared passions and values. The women are strong supporters of bodily autonomy for all people and especially pregnant people.

“Any woman can give birth any way she wants; I just want people to be educated and empowered in their decisions that they make for their body,” Christina emphasized.

Jaimee agreed. “I don’t support only non-medicated, low-intervention births,” she said. “I tell everybody that it’s their desired birth. I have some folks that come in and say, ‘I know I’m gonna get an epidural,’ and I’m like, ‘Sister, awesome.’”

***Doula Jaimee, a natural caregiver, provides emotional and educational support to mothers and mothers-to-be.***

While Christina and Jaimee both are huge advocates of home births, which are necessarily without pain medication (as using pain medication requires medical monitoring that is unavailable at home), they are firm in their belief that hospitals and medical doctors serve an important role in maternal healthcare.

“Christina operates in the ‘yellow flags,’” Jaimee said, explaining that, if a planned home birth becomes suddenly risky, an immediate transport to a hospital is initiated. “It’s not ‘home birth or nothing.’”

“My end goal is a healthy mom and a healthy baby at every birth, not a home birth [at all costs],” Christina added. Though she and Jaimee are trained in emergency situations, they endeavor never to need to employ those skills.

“We have really good relationships with the OB-GYNs in town,” Jaimee said. She recalled that, in 2020, CHRISTUS St. Michael Hospital even threw a party for local birthworkers, signifying a new era of maternal care in the Texarkana area, in which pregnant people, birth workers, doctors, and nurses all work together to serve parents and babies.

Christina and Jaimee have had to fight stigma against professional birth workers, caused by unlicensed midwives, who lack proper education and training. Ethical midwives and doulas are constantly correcting misconceptions about the work they do. Only about 1.5% of births in the United States are home births, though roughly 12% are attended by a midwife. Relatively few people therefore understand the roles that birth workers can play in a society that values maternal empowerment. One of Christina’s top priorities is “getting the word out and letting people know that home-birth midwives are safe and trained,” she said. “We’re here—I’m here—to serve our community.”

Looking to the future, Jaimee and Christina both dream of a day when all pregnant people are educated in their birthing options and receive the care they want, need, and deserve. The U.S. maternal mortality rate is staggeringly high, with almost 24 deaths per 100,000 live births overall; in comparison, the Canadian rate is 8.4, and Denmark’s is 1.6. Within the United States, Black women experience more than twice the risk of maternal death than white women.

“The maternal mortality rate of our sisters of color is absolutely atrocious,” Christina said. “It’s absolutely disgraceful, the disproportionate rate at which women of color are passing away. They need to be empowered, and they need to be supported.”

Christina and Jaimee are staunch advocates of maternal support—and not just for six weeks postpartum. Though technically a midwife’s role ends at that point, the need for care does not spontaneously end 42 days after delivery. While they dream of a society in which the standard postpartum recovery period is 12 months, in the meantime (in addition to on-going support customized to each family’s needs), Christina and Jaimee host monthly “mom coffees,” where former and current clients can meet, bond, and receive unofficial support from a community of mothers.

“Our clients become our family, our sisters,” Jaimee said. “It is a sisterhood of motherhood.”

For more information or to contact Christina or Jaimee, visit their websites: midwifechristina.com and fourstatesdoulas.com.

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