“The person who's birthing has to go very deep into their own thing, and nobody can do it for them. But having a strong tether – I feel so honoured to be a part of that.” - Emily Ekelund, Registered Midwife

During the pandemic, I learned that midwives in Ontario had not been deemed frontline workers. Midwifery is a regulated part of our healthcare system, accounting for roughly one in five births in Ontario. Given this, and midwifery’s unique ability to offer home as choice of birthplace — a particularly valuable option when people were avoiding hospitals — I was baffled by this exclusion. That early awareness led me to photographically explore the contributions made by midwifery to the pandemic healthcare landscape, and most recently to document the care midwives provide to people who would otherwise face extreme difficulty accessing perinatal healthcare. The culmination is “A Strong Tether” — a documentary photography project illustrating the impact of perinatal healthcare on birthing people and their communities.