As a Minnesota family and newborn photographer, I’ve spent years walking into homes a day or two after a baby arrives. I’ve heard a lot of birth stories. But until I sat down for this conversation, I could not have told you what a midwife actually does. I knew the word. That was about it.
That’s exactly why I started my Made for Minnesota Moms YouTube series. I wanted real conversations with real Minnesota women who support pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, so you don’t have to piece it together from strangers on the internet at 2 a.m.
Today’s guest is Kayla Kronfeld, CPM, LM, a home birth midwife in Minnesota and the founder of Meadowlark Midwifery. She’s been in birth work since 2018, started out as a doula, and just launched her own practice serving families across the Twin Cities.
We covered a lot. What a midwife’s scope actually includes, how home water births work (including where the tub comes from), how she plans ahead for a hospital transfer, what postpartum visits look like, and the difference between a midwife and a doula. I walked away from this one having learned so much more than I expected.
Meet Kayla Kronfeld, Certified Professional Midwife
Kayla Kronfeld is a certified professional midwife and licensed midwife serving families in the Twin Cities area. She completed her midwifery education at the Midwives College of Utah and now runs Meadowlark Midwifery.
Her focus is individualized, autonomous care. She trusts that her clients know what’s best for their bodies, their baby, and their birth, and she builds her whole practice around informed consent instead of a provider calling the shots.
When she’s not doing birthy things, Kayla is canoeing with her family, playing board games, and ghost hunting. (She’s also back in school to become a registered herbalist, which she casually dropped on me mid-interview like it was nothing.)
What a Home Birth Midwife in Minnesota Actually Covers
Here’s the first thing that surprised me. A midwife is a healthcare provider. Kayla said it plainly, and then joked that she gets the 10 percent provider discount on dog food at Pet Supplies Plus. So yes, it’s official.
Her care spans conception, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and newborn. That includes:
- Preconception counseling for people struggling to get pregnant or stay pregnant
- Labs and testing, which she can draw in house
- Prenatal care, either in her office or in your home
- Birth, at home or (in the past) at a birth center
- Postpartum and newborn visits through six weeks
- Well person care for established clients, within her scope
There’s one distinction worth knowing before you start calling around. Different midwife credentials come with different scopes. Certified nurse midwives can prescribe, so they can handle birth control and connect you to some medical supports directly. Kayla’s licensure in Minnesota doesn’t include pharmaceuticals. She was upfront that in a state like Washington or Oregon, she could. Here, she can’t.
That doesn’t leave you stuck. She keeps connections with nurse midwives around Minnesota so her clients still get what they need. She also refers out for ultrasounds (her words: she can’t tell the difference between a bladder, a baby, and a leg, which honestly made me feel better about my own scan-reading skills). Some nurse midwives in private practice offer bedside ultrasound, and she’ll point you there.
Is a Home Birth in Minnesota Safe?
This was my biggest question going in, and I’ll be honest, I assumed a hospital was automatically the more sterile option.
Kayla’s take is that home is where most people feel safest and calmest, with everything they want already within reach. There’s also less exposure to germs and viruses that are simply going around a hospital building. You’re in your own space with your own microbiome.
She isn’t running some no-medicine operation, either. She’s monitoring baby’s wellbeing, taking vitals, charting, and thinking three steps ahead the entire time. If your labor is running 18 hours, she’s already planning for a tired uterus and how she’d manage a postpartum hemorrhage.
One more thing she brought up that stuck with me. She used to moonlight at Willow Birth Center, which has since closed because of insurance reimbursement. Her point was that insurance companies need to start covering autonomous birth care, because when they don’t, families lose options.
Watch the Full Interview
Before I get into the Q&A, here’s the full conversation.
If you’d rather hear Kayla explain it herself (she’s funny, she’s direct, and she talks about birth like a person instead of a pamphlet), press play. If you’d rather skim, keep scrolling. I pulled out the questions and the answers that stuck with me.
Q&A with Kayla Kronfeld, CPM, LM
1. How did you go from middle school teacher to home birth midwife?
Kayla taught middle school social studies (and loved it) while training to become a yoga instructor. One of her training requirements was taking a variety of yoga classes, so she signed up for a prenatal class at Blooma’s Plymouth location.
She wasn’t pregnant. She wasn’t planning on kids. She just walked out so relaxed she decided everyone needed to try it. So she started teaching prenatal yoga.
Then students started asking her to be their doula, and she had no idea what a doula was. She thought it might be a live-in nanny situation. (Her reaction: she was already teaching kids all day, she wasn’t sure she wanted to move in with someone.) Blooma happened to be hosting a doula training, she signed up, and figured out what the job was partway through the training itself.
From there, doula clients started asking if she’d ever consider becoming a midwife or an OB. She knew she didn’t want to work inside a hospital system. She needed a program she could do online because she was still working at a charter school and supporting herself. The Midwives College of Utah made that possible.
2. Why home birth instead of hospital-based care?
Two reasons, and one of them made me laugh out loud.
The practical one: she wanted to provide more intimate care and actually know the people she was working with.
The other one: she didn’t want to wear scrubs. Kayla was a high heels every day kind of teacher, and giving up her shoes was a real consideration. She now goes barefoot to almost every birth, which she finds very funny in hindsight.
She’s clear that she isn’t the right midwife for everybody. Some families want a provider who holds a firmer boundary and keeps things strictly professional, and she thinks that’s great. Her words: there’s a care provider out there for everyone, and she doesn’t need to be that for everyone.
3. What do prenatal visits look like with a midwife?
Her prenatals run about an hour, often longer. (She said she can talk to a brick wall, and after 40 minutes with her, I believe it.)
The teacher in her never left. She walks through what’s coming up eight weeks from now, what labs and testing are recommended, and what the options are for each one. Then she sends you off with information to read over the next four to six weeks so you can come back with questions.
The goal is that you feel good about every choice you make, instead of finding out something’s happening while it’s happening.
4. How does a home water birth actually work?
Kayla brings the tub. She provides all the tub supplies too, and each client gets their own disposable sterile liner.
If you have a nice bathtub, she’ll often just use yours. It’s your own tub and your own germs, so there’s nothing there your body isn’t already used to. Her one request: if you just bathed the dog in it, please clean it first.
On why water helps, she pointed to hydrotherapy as one of the best comfort measures out there, backed by evidence over and over. The pressure shift makes contractions feel more manageable. And when babies are born into water, they don’t take that first breath underwater, so it’s a gentler landing than bright lights and cold air.
There are limits. She requires a full STI panel, which usually doesn’t rule out a water birth, it just tells her what PPE she needs to keep everyone protected. Water temperature matters too. Too warm can raise baby’s heart rate and stress them, too cool isn’t comfortable once baby is out.
Plenty of her clients labor in the water for the relief and then get out to deliver on land. That’s completely fine. She loves land births too, and shared a saying I keep thinking about: born in the space that you were created. (Then she pointed out that not all babies are created in beds, and we both lost it.)
5. Do most of your clients choose a water birth?
She hasn’t run her own numbers yet since Meadowlark is new. At the practice she came from, she remembers it running around 80 percent.
6. How do you plan for complications or a hospital transfer?
This is where I realized how much thinking happens before labor even starts.
Minnesota requires every licensed midwife to have a medical consultation plan for each client, and midwives have to upload it with their licensure renewal. So the state checks that it exists, that it’s current, and that clients are actually being offered one.
On Kayla’s version, each family identifies:
- An established provider or hospital, which could be an OB, a primary care doctor who delivers, or even the family doc
- A pediatrician, either their current one or one they’re interviewing
- Their nearest hospital, for a true emergency
- In-network hospitals across the metro, broken out by region (western burbs, eastern burbs, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and so on)
That last one matters more than it sounds. She bills as out of network, so if a family needs to transfer and lands at a hospital that isn’t covered, they’re paying her fee plus a hospital bill that can run into the tens of thousands. Hospitals also go on divert sometimes, meaning they’re not accepting anyone, so she wants a covered backup already picked.
There’s a preferred hospital line too. She’s had clients who work in a hospital system and specifically don’t want to give birth where they work. If it’s not an emergency, she wants to know that ahead of time.
7. What does postpartum and newborn care look like?
Every midwife practice runs this differently. Kayla’s rhythm looks like this:
- Day one or two in your home
- Day three in your home
- One week in your home
- Two weeks in her office
- Six weeks in her office
(She promised that if you have your baby at 2 a.m., she is not showing up at 2 a.m. the next day. Nobody needs that.)
She’s trained and comfortable with normal newborns, and she still encourages every family to establish care with a pediatrician. Her reasoning was refreshingly honest: newborns are wild. She’s had moments of staring at a baby wondering whether she’s looking at a rash or a smashed Cheerio, and she’s called pediatricians afterward to confirm that yes, that thing is normal.
The relationship doesn’t end at six weeks, either. Established clients can come back for well person care that’s within her scope, and she had a client reach out a year and a half postpartum just looking for a new pediatrician.
She did share one boundary she holds. She has real friendships with former clients, but you can’t be both at once. She’s currently waiting out a pregnancy with a friend who used to be a client, keeping things strictly professional until after the baby comes. Then they go back to being friends.
8. What’s the biggest misconception about midwifery care?
The question she gets most is how she’s different from a doula.
Kayla loves doulas. She was one, and several of her closest friends still are. Doulas provide emotional and physical support, access to resources, and help families work through their options. She can do all of that too.
The difference is the medical piece. She’s checking baby’s wellbeing, taking vitals, charting, and making clinical decisions. She’s also the one providing your actual prenatal care, so instead of seeing a doula a couple times before birth, you’re seeing her at every appointment.
One correction she made that I’m still thinking about. I asked if she’s the person who delivers the baby, and she said, moms deliver the babies. She’s there.
9. What’s one powerful moment you’ll never forget?
She said there are too many to pick one, so she gave me a theme instead.
The moment a parent holds their child for the first time and realizes how strong they are. She called it heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. Heartwarming because they’re recognizing their own power. Heartbreaking because they ever doubted it.
Then she said the part that made me put my pen down. It makes her reflect on how we talk about women’s bodies and everything they’re capable of, and whether we’ve been teaching that well at all.
The Real Life Rescue Kit
At the end of every episode, I ask my guests for three Minnesota specific recommendations that help moms in real life. Here’s what Kayla shared:
- Takeout rescue: Zen Ramen in Maplewood. Her standing order is Sawadeeka tea, a pork bun, and tonkotsu ramen. (She also wanted a shout-out to the Aldi next door, which she says is the best one.)
- Worth-the-effort outing: Viking Fest in Dakota County, held in October. She said it’s good for ages 0 to 99. There are horses from Europe, jousting, sheep and darning (you can make your own rug), and the largest replicated Viking living village, where you can walk through and eat the meals. There are adult nights too. For the record, my husband is a diehard Vikings fan and this is not that. Actual Vikings.
- Local mom resource: Childbirth Collective. Doulas, chiropractors, physical therapists, mental health support, and pelvic floor therapists in one place. They also run free topic nights and panels, so if you want to learn more about doulas or midwives before you commit to anything, start there.
Where to Find Kayla
- Email: kayla@meadowlarkmidwifery.com (she said this is the best way to reach her)
- Visit Meadowlark Midwifery
- Follow her on Instagram
Fair warning on the Instagram. Kayla told me she doesn’t really know how to use it, and her partner had to tell her to post something so people wouldn’t think the account was a bot. Give her some grace.
A Personal Note from Me
I say this every time, and I’ll keep saying it. Minnesota moms deserve real conversations and real resources, not whatever the algorithm hands you at 2 a.m.
I genuinely did not know what a midwife fully before this interview. Now I know it’s someone who can walk with you from before you’re pregnant all the way through six weeks postpartum, mostly in your own living room. That’s an option a lot of us never hear about, and you can’t choose something you don’t know exists.
Whether that’s a home birth midwife in Minnesota, a postpartum doula, or women’s health acupuncture, you deserve a team you picked on purpose.
As a Minnesota family photographer, I get to witness the after. The first days home, the sibling meeting the baby, the exhausted proud look on a mom’s face. Kayla put it well when she said we both get to witness life changing.
If you’re in the postpartum season, take a look at my Postpartum Care Kit. If you’re still pregnant, grab my free Minneapolis Pregnancy Guide. And if you want more conversations like this one, join my newsletter so you don’t miss the next episode.
Because motherhood isn’t meant to be figured out alone.
If you’re ready to document this season of your family’s story with photography, I offer fresh 48 and newborn sessions, as well as family photography. I’d love to connect with you.
Disclaimer: This blog post is for educational and informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek advice from your physician, midwife, or other qualified healthcare provider with questions about pregnancy, labor, postpartum, or your health.
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