Meet Kim Woodard Osterholzer, Author of A MIDWIFE IN AMISH COUNTRY

Kim Woodard Osterholzer

Kim Woodard Osterholzer, CPM, RM, LM is a homebirth midwife of seventeen years with an active practice in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Kim’s attended the births of 580 little ones, including those of her grandbabies. Her passion is helping families off to a good start, and her heart thrills to encourage, inspire, empower, and equip those she serves to live their lives to the full. She’s founder and proprietor of both Birth at Home Midwifery Services and Born For This: Giving Birth to a Happy, Healthy Family, and is the author of A Midwife in Amish Country, Celebrating God’s Gift of Life, Nourish and Thrive: Happy, Healthy Childbearing, One Little Life at a Time: Recommendations and Record Keeping for Aspiring Homebirth Midwives, and Homebirth: Safe and Sacred. Kim lives with her husband Steven and together they revel in a blended family of five children, two children-in-law, and three grandchildren.

Your book, A MIDWIFE IN AMISH COUNTRY, details your beginnings as a midwife in Michigan. What was the primary motivation for you to consider this type of career?

I spent my girlhood enamored with pregnancy! Not with babies, really, just with the idea women are able to grow whole human beings right inside their bellies! I don’t remember giving how women managed to get those babies out a lot of thought, though. My mom always described her births so positively, I only knew I wanted to have a few babies, too.

And then I accidentally watched a birth video in middle school, and I fainted, and I went home and told my mom I was NEVER EVER going to have a baby.

A couple years after that, I ran into a woman who was training to be a midwife. I told her my plans to NEVER EVER have a baby, and she probed into my reasoning. When I told her about the film, she assured me I’d seen a hospital birth, and asked if I realized some women have their babies at home with midwives. When she offered to lend me a book about homebirth with midwives, I eagerly accepted. 

She sent me home with A Midwife’s Story—the gorgeous true tale of a midwife who tended the Amish in Pennsylvania. I read it in a single sitting, and closed it knowing I was called by God Himself to the same.


Could you share a few of the life lessons learned as a midwife?

I’ve discovered midwifery, like birth itself, to be a perfect microcosm of life. Birth, properly supported, generally works, but it comes with no guarantees. 

It’s glorious! It’s miraculous! It’s utterly transformative!

But it can be scary and heart wrenching, too.

It takes vision. It takes faith. It takes hard work. It’s costly. It takes deep humility. 

It’s unbelievably rewarding. 

And, oh, how it matters.


As a writer, I’m intrigued by the way you intertwined your career as a midwife with your own family life. How did you come to decide to include both in your book?

My work as a homebirth midwife is simply one of the many expressions of my womanhood—more a way of life than a career. Being on-call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, year in and year out makes it so—insists it be so—and insists it be so for the entire family. It colors every aspect of life. It’s enriching and it’s inescapable. 

In our home, midwifery took the whole family. We tended to life together with the potential for me to dash away at any moment continually humming in the background—knowing when I did dash away, there was no way to know when I’d come back. 

I wouldn’t have been able to practice midwifery without the blessing of my husband and children. From start to finish, they were part of the work. They made the most of the time I was home, and gamely carried on without me when I wasn’t. Because Brent and Hannah and Paul lived with a homebirth midwife, they lived very different lives from the lives of our friends, and there were times I fretted about that… 

I don’t know how I could have shared the story of my work without sharing the story of my family as well. It would have been a disservice to them to try.

Photo Credit: Amish Wisdom

In the Epilogue of A MIDWIFE IN AMISH COUNTRY you wrote: “It’s a story about trust, respect, honor, and dignity. A story about uncommon communities of families who drew me into their lives and taught me their ways…” Could you expand a bit on that? Especially about how the Amish families drew you into their lives and taught you?

The Amish are a people who prefer to keep to themselves—who even must keep to themselves in order to preserve their faith and their way of life.  

And, so, if you find the Amish have let you in, you’ll find you’re in for something special.

There are few occupations so uniquely poised to provide entry into Amish life besides homebirth midwifery.

There are few opportunities within homebirth midwifery quite like serving among the Amish to truly come to know the heart and soul of homebirth midwifery.

When the Amish began to open their lives to me, I began to learn what Jesus meant when He said life is found only in the laying away of our lives. 

I learned what a solemn gift it is to be trusted with life and death, with health and well-being and irreplaceable moments.

I learned to be a steward. 

I learned to get down on my knees and serve.

Logo for Kim Woodard Osterholzer's midwifery services

In the Epilogue to A MIDWIFE IN AMISH COUNTRY you mention your first experience at witnessing a birth via midwife assistance. At one point someone reported that the baby had been born but wasn’t breathing. Ultimately the baby did begin to breathe. Considering that dramatic beginning, what convinced you to continue the call to be a midwife?

Having watched similar moments bring other burgeoning midwifery careers to a close, I can only say I understood the call to midwifery was a call that stood to break my heart.

I put it this way in my most recent book, Homebirth: Safe & Sacred:

When I first began the pursuit of my calling, I read Robert Bradley’s Husband-Coached Childbirth with these lines printed on its pages, “There’s an irreducible incidence of complications in human obstetrics…” 

I remember the very sobering chord those words struck in my young soul, and I had to decide then and there whether I could serve as a midwife with the reality of them echoing through recesses of my psyche…

The day those echoes overtake me and I begin treating my clients as potential problems versus probable victories will be the day I’ll need to bring my calling to close.

Fortunately, most women and their babies bear a burden of risk low enough to birth safely at home with a well-trained midwife—by some estimates, 80-85% of women and babies—and most of those women and their babies manage to do just that. 

Fortunately again, when those women and/or their babies begin to stray away from safe, homebirth midwives are usually able to facilitate transfer of care to the hospital with everyone yet in stable condition.


Looking back on your career as a midwife, is there anything you would have done differently?

I could have been kinder to myself as I was stretching and growing and learning. I could have made more room.

And it would have been great to have begun “with the end in mind!” I plunged in to my apprenticeship rather without a plan to finish, which most certainly complicated and prolonged my efforts to bring my training to completion.


Your first husband, Brent, passed away, and you have since remarried (to Steven) and moved to Colorado. Does your practice still include a significant number of Amish families?

I only serve the Amish now when I’m visiting my daughter, Hannah Simmons. I passed my practice to Hannah when I moved to Colorado. The Colorado Amish populations are at a fair distance from Colorado Springs.


You sure have had a life filled with taking risks! How does that translate into the adventure of becoming a writer? In particular, the publication process, and most especially, promoting A MIDWIFE IN AMISH COUNTRY?

What an interesting question! I actually wrote the book HOMEBIRTH: SAFE & SACRED, after a potential client began our consultation with a comment about the “riskiness” of homebirth. Statistically speaking, low-risk birth at home with well-trained midwives is very safe! If it were otherwise, I would have pursued some other career!

But I will say the pursuit of thing like homebirth midwifery, especially in our remarkably misinformed culture, requires a very solid helping of ingenuity, self-discipline, assurance, and guts, and I’m sure each of those qualities have aided me in my determination to write, pitch, publish, and promote my books!


If you had a practical piece of wisdom to pass along to any aspiring writers, what would you tell them?

I’d encourage aspiring writers to do everything in their power to attend a writer’s conference! I attended the Colorado Christian Writer’s Conference in 2016, about a year after I finished the first draft of A Midwife in Amish Country. I learned a lot there, and made some vital connections.

I also got a good deal out of reading the first few sections of The Writer’s Market and Platform by Michael Hyatt.

Here's the link to A MIDWIFE IN AMISH COUNTRY

Here's the link to Kim's website

National Campaign Nonviolence Week

According to the Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service website, this is Campaign Nonviolence Week, which culminates in the International Peace Day on September 21.

Pace e Bene is tracking nonviolence actions this week across the world. You can take a look at the latest update here.

As part of this weeklong celebration of an alternative to violent confrontation, in all its forms, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at a few historic figures who practiced nonviolence in their own lives.

From a biblical perspective, nonviolence is an essential part of the Christian faith and those who follow Jesus.

In the New Testament, Jesus told the Pharisees (in Luke 11:42) "What sorrow awaits you Pharisees! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore justice and the love of God. You should tithe yes, but do not neglect the more important things." (NLT)

You could argue that among the 'more important things' that Jesus walked out in his own life were a commitment to nonviolence - even to the point of death - justice and humility.

Of course, the Old Testament standard of what the Lord requires of us is answered very succinctly in Micah 6:8: "Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God." (NLT)

On a more recent level, the following list of individuals is by no means exhaustive, it's meant only to inspire us in our own seeking of nonviolence.

Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist, in particular in the area of voter registration. Starting in 1963 she traveled across Mississippi helping register blacks to vote while resisting Jim Crow laws.
In 1964 she helped organize Freedom Summer which brought in hundreds of college students from across the country to help register voters. That same year she helped to found the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party when the national Democratic Party sought to block blacks from being delegates to the national convention.

Though Hamer was arrested several times, as well as beaten - once almost to the point of death - she never countered with violence. She was an unabashed Christian and often mentioned the teachings of Jesus and his nonviolence as a bedrock of her own actions.

Rosa Parks helped set the table for the Civil Rights Movement by refusing to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery. In 1955 she simply stayed seated when asked to move to make room for white passengers. Parks' action helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which the Women's National History Museum called "one of the largest social movements in history." It was also nonviolent. Even before her action in 1955, Parks had a history of civil rights engagement.

Harriet Tubman was an active member of the Underground Railroad in the 1850s. After she herself escaped from the South, she eventually returned several times to bring other slaves to freedom. Because of her Underground Railroad work, she gained extensive knowledge of actual railroad transportation lines. It was in this capacity that she became a Union spy during the Civil War.

John Lewis, who is currently serving as a US Representative from Georgia, had a decades-long involvement in the Civil Rights movement. This included walking alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Lewis' skull was fractured by police while attempting to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.

So horrific were the newspaper images of the violence perpetrated by law enforcement officials who unsuccessfully sought to squelch their march that the day was labeled "Bloody Sunday."

Throughout his involvement with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, Lewis repeatedly advocated for nonviolent action among its participants.

As the Campaign Nonviolence Week culminates with an international day of peace on September 21, let's keep in mind the powerful example of those who have gone before us.

JESUS & NONVIOLENCE: A THIRD WAY - A Review

Walter Wink/Penguin-Random House

Walter Wink's book, JESUS AND NONVIOLENCE: A THIRD WAY starts out strong and keeps getting stronger.

Take this gem from page six: "The issue is not, 'What must I do in order to secure my salvation?' but rather, 'What does God require of me in response to the needs of others?'"

Throughout his book, Wink systematically and powerfully lays out a case for Christian nonviolence. He suggests that there are three basic ways to respond to evil - passivity, violent opposition or militant nonviolence. Wink says Jesus chose and calls us to the third option.

In light of this, faithful Sunday school attendees may be a little shocked at Wink's interpretation of Jesus suggesting that his followers turn the other cheek, give up your cloak and go the extra mile. In each case, far from being acts of passivity or acquiescence towards evil, in Wink's view, each of Jesus' statements is an example of radical, nonviolent action.

"Jesus suggests amplifying an injustice [by turning the other cheek, going the extra mile or giving up your cloak] in order to expose the fundamental wrongness of legalized oppression."

Within this framework, Jesus is not the impossibly meek-and-mild guy who got angry only once, overturning some moneylenders' carts in the temple. "Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil," says Wink.

As you might expect such a stance makes for an interesting approach to handling evil. "Jesus' teaching is a kind of moral jujitsu, a martial art for using the momentum of evil to throw it," Wink writes.

Jesus being who he was, there's a lot more going on in his moral universe than good triumphing over evil. "Jesus' intent wasn't only to disarm the enemy, but to hold open the possibility of the enemy becoming just."

So just how do we, being human, hope to accomplish this mind-bending possibility on earth?
According to Link there are three rules for nonviolent engagement:
1. Honor the humanity of others,
2. Believe that God can transform them,
3. Treat others with dignity and respect

And in the end, all of these actions will disarm the myth of redemptive violence used by those who are doing the oppressing.

Towards the end of his book, Link makes this prophetic statement (writing in 2003): "Love of enemies, for our time, has become the litmus test of authentic Christian faith. Commitment to justice, liberation, or the overthrow of oppression is not enough. Love of enemies is the recognition that they too are children of God."

This whole idea of loving our enemies, says Link,  leads to the central question: "How can I find God in my enemy? Salvation used to be a purely private affair [Luther's claim of] justification by faith through grace, has now, in our age, grown to embrace the world."

What is simply amazing to me is not just the depth but the clarity and timeliness of Link's message. For anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus, or is in the least bit interested in the relevance of Jesus' message, especially with today's sensitivity towards social justice, or lack of it, JESUS AND NONVIOLENCE: A THIRD WAY speaks eloquently.