Victoria Adeyeye fainted the first time she watched a baby being born. It was 2012, she was volunteering at a hospital trying to decide if midwifery was really for her, and the room around her was loud and urgent, the kind of birth where staff shout at a mother to push the way you would shout at someone struggling to lift something heavy. She hit the floor before the baby arrived, and years later, that same moment is still what pushes her to talk about home birth in Nigeria at every chance she gets.
Today, she is a trained midwife and doula who runs Midwife To Go, a Lagos based practice built around home birth, water birth and childbirth education.
This August, Midwife To Go is hosting Nigeria’s first Water Birth Training, across Lagos and Abuja, with Barbara Harper, founder of Waterbirth International and a trainer with over 40 years in the field, flying in to lead the sessions. One day is set aside for doctors, nurses and midwives who want the clinical skills. Another is for parents who simply want to walk in already understanding their options.
Harper has already carried this work to Tanzania, South Africa and Egypt, and Victoria kept asking herself why Nigeria was not on that list yet. “Nigeria is the giant of Africa,” she says, still sounding somewhere between amused and frustrated by the wait. “Why are we not championing this?”
Home birth in Nigeria, she believes, does not have to be the fringe choice it currently is. It just needs people willing to slow down and build it properly, which is exactly what she has spent the last few years trying to do.
The Birth That Changed Everything
To understand why Victoria cares this much, you have to go back to a second birth, five years after the one that sent her to the floor.
In 2017, she watched a home water birth unfold in the United States, and it undid almost everything the first one had taught her.
“There was calm music playing, and there were fairy lights everywhere, like Christmas lights,” Victoria remembers. “The dad was there supporting his wife the whole time, and the midwife was just checking in quietly until it was time for her to give birth. It was just beautiful and calm, and it was so different from what I’ve experienced in Nigeria. I remember telling myself that I want my people in Nigeria to experience gentle birthing too. It doesn’t have to be chaotic.”
That promise sat with her for years before it became Midwife To Go, a team of midwives and doulas that Victoria built to carry the same vision forward. The team follows a woman from early pregnancy through six weeks after birth, offering antenatal visits, labor support and postpartum doula care, alongside education that Victoria asserts is just as central to the work as anything clinical. They run childbirth classes that deliberately include fathers, since an informed partner tends to become one of the strongest advocates a woman can have in the room once labor starts. That same instinct led Victoria to publish a book last year, Journey to Motherhood, with a section written specifically for men, now sold on Amazon and Selar.
None of it happens without screening first, though. Every client goes through a full risk assessment, and Midwife To Go only takes on low risk, healthy pregnancies. Women dealing with conditions like pre-eclampsia get referred straight to hospital care, because for the team, home birth in Nigeria was always meant to widen the range of safe choices, not replace a hospital when one is genuinely needed.
Busting the Biggest Myths About Home Birth in Nigeria
Ask Victoria what actually holds people back from considering home birth in Nigeria, and two fears surface almost every time.
The first is that a baby born in water will drown. It sounds logical, until you remember something most people never stop to think about. A baby spends nine months surrounded by fluid already, since the womb is filled with amniotic fluid, which is salty water. “It’s interesting to know that in the womb, babies already live inside water,” Victoria explains. “So when they’re born into water, it’s really the same environment. You’re letting them stay in something familiar before they’re brought all the way out of it. It’s very natural, and it helps with the pain of contractions too.” Victoria is firm that this only works with a skilled provider present, and nobody should try it alone out of curiosity.
Then there is the second fear, and it makes her laugh every time someone brings it up. Are we mermaids? “When you drink water, are you a fish?” she asks. “Or when you shower, are you a fish? No. It’s just hydrotherapy.” Water birth is also far from a modern trend. Victoria points out that cultures around the world have practiced it for centuries.
Here is the detail that tends to surprise people the most, though. A recent study following 10,000 mothers found that women who gave birth in water tore significantly less than those who did not, especially first time mothers, since the water itself pushes back gently against the pressure that usually causes tearing. It quietly reframes the entire conversation, because most people assume water birth is about comfort alone, when there is real physiology behind it too.
A third misconception carries the most weight of all, since it decides who even considers this option in the first place. Many assume home birth in Nigeria is something only wealthy families can afford. Victoria rejects that immediately. “When you take a shower every day, do you feel like, oh wow, I’m the richest person on Earth? No,” she says. “It’s just like that.” Medical eligibility decides who qualifies, not income. “We are evidence based,” she says. “You have to be eligible.”
A Bigger Vision for African Women
One story stays with Victoria more than most. “A lady reached out to me, and she said for her first baby, she really wanted a water birth and wanted to work with a private midwife,” Victoria recalls. “She found one person in Lagos, but the person never responded back to her. So they decided to go to Egypt, but it didn’t work out, and they went ahead and went to Barbados. They spent all that money because of the care we are kind of giving right here. I want people in Nigeria to be able to access the kind of care they can access abroad.” Victoria brings this up carefully, never to shame anyone for seeking care abroad, only to point at what it actually costs, financially and emotionally, when that option does not exist closer to home.
Nigeria still carries one of the higher maternal mortality rates in the world, and Victoria never claims home birth solves that on its own. Instead, she is building a genuine alternative for the specific women who qualify medically and want it, rather than leaving them to hear that a hospital bed is their only choice.
“We are hoping in the next five to seven years, if God wills, to have a birth center that is more homey here in Nigeria,” she says. “We hope to have a space where people can come and get education, like a seminar room for practical training for healthcare providers, and also for parents, where there’s a yoga class, stretch classes, childbirth classes, just a space for education, because we believe education is power.”
She keeps coming back to one image when she talks about what she actually wants. A woman in Lagos, in labor, at home, surrounded by people she trusts, never once wondering if she made the wrong choice by staying. Home birth in Nigeria, Victoria says, was never meant to be the only option. It was only ever meant to be one.
