Hi! My name is Summer Richards, and I am a midwife, wife-wife (haha), and homeschooling mother of 7. My journey into midwifery began with my own births - I have had a home birth midwife for all of my pregnancies (including a miscarriage), and all but one of my babies have been born at home. After my fourth, I was sad to think that my birth experiences would be winding down, but I didn’t want the “responsibility” of being a midwife, so I pursued a doula certification, which I began in 2019 and completed in 2020 (despite my miscarriage and the Covid pandemic). 

After working as a doula for a couple of years, I realized that most parents don’t hire doulas until the very end of the pregnancy (I even had an experience where I was hired on a Thursday and the mother gave birth the following Monday!), and there were so many things that I saw could be even avoided entirely with better nutritional counseling and body work earlier in the pregnancy. Talking to my doula clients (many who gave birth in the hospital) opened up for me a whole world where mother and baby were treated separately (which, in my personal experience, was strange and unnatural - why would a mother leave her newborn baby behind as she went to a follow-up OB appointment 6 weeks after delivery?). Especially with the lack of nutritional counseling (I had several clients who said that the extent of their nutritional counseling throughout the entire pregnancy was a piece of paper given at their initial visit) and the problems like pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, and high blood pressure, I realized that I could better serve the mothers who came to me in the role of midwife, where I could see them more often and earlier in their pregnancies, with enough time to actually make a difference for them at the end of their pregnancies. It turns out that the “responsibility” of midwifery could make a real difference for mothers in my community.

So, in 2021, about 6 months after my 5th baby was born at home, I began my apprenticeship with Diane and Kristin. After about a year Kristin backed off on how many people she was seeing as her life transitioned her to a different picture of midwifery, so I worked with Diane, traveling from Longview to Mt Pleasant every week and working on making it to births at the birth center and in clients’ homes near and around Mt Pleasant. I even did a week-long stint during my last pregnancy at a high-volume birth center in Washington state, working with two other midwives and several students. As of January 2026, I am a Certified Professional Midwife licensed to practice in the state of Texas, and as of June 2026 I am also licensed in the state of Louisiana, after an apprenticeship where I have had two babies of my own and learned so much, and I look forward to serving moms in the Longview and surrounding areas.