We recently connected with Rixa Freeze and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Rixa thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

Prior to starting my nonprofit, Breech Without Borders, I had been invited to St. Petersburg, Russia to give a series of lectures about breech birth (when the baby comes out bum/feet first, rather than head-first). I was citing a study that dominates medical practice in much of the world, and the attendees said, “What is this study? We have never heard of it!”

At the same time, I spent nearly a year delving through the medical literature and kept discovering articles and innovations that never made it beyond certain linguistic or geographic boundaries. For example, one set of techniques was developed in Russia but had never spread outside of Eastern Europe.

I realized that we had a pressing need to spread knowledge and techniques across borders: geographic, cultural, and linguistic. I thought, “Someone should start an organization that does this!” (never imagining that the next year, that “someone” would be me).

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I have a PhD in American Studies, with emphasis in childbirth and maternity care. My PhD was interdisciplinary, which is the perfect fit for what I now do–taking information and helping it cross borders of all kinds: linguistic, cultural, geographic, and educational. I didn’t specialize in breech birth initially; my focus was first on midwifery, home birth, and unassisted birth. However, breech birth was always a side interest. About 8 years ago, I decided to focus on it exclusively.

In much of the world today, midwives and physicians have become deskilled and no longer know how to safely support a vaginal breech birth. Instead, their only solution is surgery (C-section). Now that close to 100% of breech babies are born surgically in many parts of the world, it has created a Catch-22 situation where vaginal breech birth is not safe with many providers because they lack the experience, but the cannot get the expereince because no one is doing it any more.

Our organization, Breech Without Borders, is focused on 3 main missions: training, education, and advocacy. We train midwives and doctors how to support vaginal breech births. We emphasize a physiological approach to birth, where the mother is moving, following her body’s cues, and choosing her labor and birth positions (rather than being asked to lie down and push on her back). We also educate parents and health care providers about breech birth: what it is, how it works, what the risks and benefits are. And finally, we help advocate for women to have the choice in how their babies are born and for providers to be supported rather than punished for upholding women’s autonomy.

We provide training around the world, wherever we are needed. One challenge we currently face is finding funding to train in resource-poor areas. In places where the average income may be a few dollars per day, people cannot afford to pay the normal training fees that we charge in the US or Europe. We’re currently working on bringing on a grant writer to be able to expand our scope.

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

No, without hesitation. I love academic work and could not have done what I do without having a PhD. That said, a lot of what I do running the nonprofit is outside of my training and scope! I don’t come from a business/marketing/finance/web design/graphic design background and I have had to learn many of those skills. As we continue to expand, I hope to be able to find people to take over those specialities so I can focus more on research, publishing, advocacy, and curriculum development.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your firm or practice?

Our nonprofit started without any funding. When I founded it in 2018, I didn’t know exactly what it would become or big we would grow. I just knew that someone (me!) needed to do something to improve a terrible situation, where women are forced to have unnecessary surgeries because their doctors or midwives lack the appropriate training. That passion drove me to start the nonprofit on my own and without financial support.

I was fortunate to find a like-minded obstetrician early on in the nonprofit’s history. He invited me to co-teach a training workshop with me, with me giving the academic lectures and him leading the hands-on training. We enjoyed teaching together so much that we put out word in the birth community that we would be available to teach anywhere we were wanted. We were soon overwhelmed with demand. In the first 4 months of teaching full-time, we traveled all over the US and also to Canada and New Zealand.

We were generously supported by a community of parents, midwives, and doctors who donated to a fundraising campaign to help us buy obstetrical simulators, which are necessary for our training workshops. Besides these fundraisers, our organization has been entirely self-sufficient; almost all of our revenue comes from workshops and online courses.

In the past two years, we have also received several large unsolicited grants from charitable foundations. I cannot express how grateful we are that foundations would seek us out on their own intiative. We have used these funds for projects that needed additional financial support, such as paying for translation and training in resource-poor areas.

Because we rapidly switched over to online and hybrid learning at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, we were able not just survive as an organization, but thrive. In 2021 we brought on another instructor, a midwife who works part-time for MSF (Doctors Without Borders) and part-time for us. We are now starting a Train the Trainer initiative to prepare more instructors to teach under the Breech Without Borders umbrella.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://breechwithoutborders.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breechwithoutborders
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/breechwithoutborders
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/breechwithoutborders
• Other: https://vimeo.com/breechwithoutborders

Image Credits

Ali Honeycott
Indiana Núñez
Olga Ducat
Miguel de Sousa Mendes
Anna Ťopková