Down to Birth #345 | "There's Nothing More We Can Do": Two Birth Stories Midwife Sophia Henderson Never Expected
Midwife and mother of two, Sophia Henderson, host of the Born Wild podcast, joins us to tell the story of her children’s births – and how a chiropractor may have saved her newborn daughter’s life.
In her first pregnancy, Sophia navigated weeks of unexplained bleeding, chose home birth as a student midwife, and after giving birth learned her son had no anal opening and would ultimately be diagnosed with VACTERL association. She describes what it means to care for a medically complex baby, how quickly those diagnoses unfold after birth, and how that first year reshaped her understanding of risk, normalcy, and surgical intervention.
Just as her son's medical journey was unfolding when he was just a few months old, Sophia found herself pregnant again—depleted, caring for a fragile infant, and facing new legal restrictions in California that removed home birth as an option. She entered the hospital as a confident midwife who expected to advocate for herself, only to discover how difficult it is to hold onto intuition when confronted with pressure around breech, preterm labor, and surgery.
After her daughter’s premature birth, Sophia and her husband were told the baby’s lungs had collapsed, that there was “nothing more they could do,” and that she was unlikely to survive or at best, would require oxygen all her life. A desperate post to Facebook caught the attention of a chiropractor, who responded that she could see the issue and restore the baby to wellness. Her treatment was performed quietly after being snuck into the hospital, and led to a recovery so dramatic that it reframed Sophia’s entire understanding of newborn physiology and the role of chiropractic care.
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