Name: Torrince “Tori” Aster (formerly Tori Freund)
Graduation Year: 2020
Major: Women’s & Gender Studies
Job: Doula at Greater Love Birth and Community Care and midwife-in-training with Transitions Birth Services
“Call the Midwife” is a surprisingly accurate show, said Tori Aster. They would know; Aster started their own business offering services as a doula immediately after graduating from UWM’s Women & Gender Studies program in 2020. Today, they are in the final stages of their training to become a certified professional midwife.
Aster hails from Kewaskum, Wisconsin, and started their college career at UW-Washington County before transferring to UW-Milwaukee. They chose the school in part because they wanted to be in a bigger city and in part because of UWM’s Women’s Gender Studies department, LGBTQ Center, and Women’s Resource Center.
“I knew that it was at least going to be a more welcoming and inclusive space,” Aster said.
They were in the midst of their studies at UWM when Aster was invited to attend a friend’s home birth as a support person. That inspired them to begin exploring birth work as a career. In 2019, Aster completed their training to become a doula.
“A doula is a non-medical birth support person. They focus on physical, mental, and emotional support and information and advocacy,” Aster explained. “(My WGS major) was going to be really helpful foundational knowledge for me to be a doula.”
After they graduated in December of 2020, Aster founded their company, Greater Love Birth and Community Care, to provide doula services in Milwaukee. There are many resources for small business owners available through both UWM and the City of Milwaukee, Aster said, but being a doula may have been easier than being an entrepreneur.
“I was really, really excited to start, (but you should) take it slow and learn about all of your options and all of the steps thoroughly before you just jump in,” Aster advised ruefully. “I had to do a lot of ‘two steps forward, one step back,’ because I got too excited. If I could go back, I would take my time a little bit more and get a good handle on things before moving through the process of starting a business.”
Aster happily served their clients for several years, but in 2022, local midwife Lucky Tomaszek asked if Aster would sign on as her part-time birth assistant. Aster began helping Tomaszek with non-medical aspects of the job, and before they knew it, Aster had met the standards for nearly half of the training to become a CPM without meaning to. So, they decided to make it official and submitted paperwork to finish their midwife training. Aster will be fully certified and licensed by next spring.
Being a midwife is a rewarding job. Aster likes that they can care for their clients throughout their pregnancies, birth, and postpartum periods. There are certified nurse midwives who deliver babies in a hospital setting, but CPMs like Aster help their clients deliver at home if that option is safe.
“It’s not dissimilar to working with an OB or an in-hospital midwife. You are not missing out on any kind of care. We still do the exact same care schedule … you still get the same access to tests and blood work and ultrasounds and everything,” Aster said. “The big difference is that we spend an hour at every single appointment with all of our clients, and we do a lot of education and preparing for an out-of-hospital birth. … We are licensed and trained to take care of both you and your baby for six weeks postpartum. We are doing the same things with your baby that your pediatrician would be doing. We’re weighing them, we’re asking about feeding, we’re asking about diapering and sleep, and we’re seeing you in your home multiple times for the first two weeks and then back at the office at four and six weeks.”
Aster enjoys bringing babies into the world, but the part they like the best is caring for the parent-to-be.
“Getting to see somebody through an incredibly transformative moment in their life, whether it’s their first baby or their 10th baby – it’s new every single time,” they said.
That seems like a great reason to call the midwife.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science