‘She made me feel like a human being’: A homeless drug user found hope from her midwife
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Midwives in California
Care from midwives is less expensive to health systems than physician care, and studies show it leads to positive health outcomes, including more breastfeeding, fewer episiotomies, lower fetal mortality rates and fewer preterm births. So why is midwifery access a statewide problem in California?
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She just wanted to help women give birth. But she learned California wouldn’t pay her
‘She made me feel like a human being’: A homeless drug user found hope from her midwife
How the California doctor lobby is making maternal care needlessly scarce and costly
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Juliana Flamporis’ pregnancy wasn’t exactly welcome news. She was homeless, and she hadn’t yearned for a child. At 25, she was regularly using meth as she bounced around Mt. Shasta in 2018, dumpster-diving and carrying an enormous backpack and a knife everywhere she went.
She did have a sense of clarity, though: After a few bad experiences, she had grown to hate hospitals. She wanted a water birth.
“I was so dead-set and determined,” Flamporis said. Researching the matter at the Mt. Shasta library, she thought, “This is too alternative of a place for there not to be at least one midwife. There’s eight crystal shops that I can see right now.”
She was right: Sue Wolcott’s birth center popped up.
Wolcott remembered the disheveled, knife-toting woman who swayed into the pink reception area — this person did not look like her typical client. But Flamporis told the midwife she was there to plan a water birth.
Wolcott had a condition. Flamporis had to be sober if she wanted to have her baby in the birth center.
Flamporis was trying to quit drugs, and she had already cut down her use a lot because of the pregnancy. “But it’s a big change going from a little bit to none,” she said. She needed help.
Doctors had already suggested rehab during prenatal checkups. At the hospital, Flamporis said, they tested her for drugs. “They had already got a hold of CPS,” she said.
The doctor’s office had called an inpatient rehab for her, but they hadn’t walked her through the process, and Flamporis had been too scared to follow up with the Redding facility.
The way Wolcott presented rehab was fundamentally different.
“She made me feel like a human being that deserved to be able to turn my life around,” Flamporis said. And Wolcott offered material support, too. She promised that she would get her a ride to rehab, and that she would help her have that water birth when the time came.
Wolcott’s midwife assistant, Heather Scalzi, picked up their new client in an alley the next day and drove her 60 miles south to the facility in Redding.
“She was willing to do what it took to get clean for her baby, and for herself, and I was so full of hope for her,” Scalzi said. “Even though she was really nervous, I think she was really, really hopeful.”
Flamporis stuck with the program. A few months later, Scalzi let the young woman go through early labor in her home from dawn until the late afternoon. At one point, Flamporis danced around Scalzi’s block singing “The Little Mermaid” power ballad “Part of Your World.”
When she went into active labor, Flamporis moved to Wolcott’s birth center. After an excruciating end-stage labor that surprisingly drove her away from the warm tub, she gave birth to a healthy, 7-pound, 6-ounce baby girl with giant blue eyes. “She was just perfect,” she said.
Flamporis spent a few more days at Scalzi’s home, then she and her daughter returned to the rehab program. They later moved to a sober living home for over a year while the young mother tried to find permanent housing. For two years, they have lived in their own apartment in Redding.
Sometimes Flamporis hears the little girl making up songs in the tub about “Minnie Mouse and her little bear friends having tea.”
Three and a half years have passed since Flamporis got sober, and she’s still sorting out her mental and physical health. She needs extensive dental work, and she’s trying to figure out how she’ll navigate college with a toddler. When she can, she hands out Narcan to drug users in Redding.
Flamporis wants to do some kind of harm-reduction work — not unlike what Wolcott did for her.
“So many homeless people and people that are addicted and stuff, they don’t even have one person that puts a little bit of work and faith into them,” Flamporis said. “I want to change people’s perception, and help people. ... I want people who have experienced these things to be the voices of change.”
She’s 29, and she feels as if her whole life is unfolding before her. But without Wolcott, she’s convinced she would have never gotten sober during her pregnancy, and she would have lost custody of her child and died.
“(If) CPS had come into my life and, for whatever reason, taken my kid, that would have been a worse outcome for every person involved,” Flamporis said. “My daughter would have gone through trauma, I would have been traumatized and probably gone right back to what I knew. And I would have probably gone so hard that I wouldn’t be here right now.”
Instead, she gets to apply to community college and hear her daughter sing. “I’m just super grateful,” she said.
This story was originally published January 2, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
