Can a midwife be present but not participating in a home birth?

Yes, any good midwife will stay ‘hands off’ if that is your wish, as long as there are no complications. (You will still need to pay her her usual fee — you’re paying for her time and expertise.)

EDIT: For those wailing about the ‘dangers’ of unlicensed midwives… some states don’t permit lay midwifery, so they don’t, obviously, ‘license’ them. But that doesn’t mean that they are untrained or dangerous. Most have received years of training/apprenticeship and are fully qualified to tend normal chlidbirth. Nor does it mean that it’s illegal to hire them. Any legal risk is shouldered by the midwife. And realistically, most states where it’s ‘illegal’ don’t run around hunting down midwives to prosecute. They don’t bother anyone unless there is a problem and they’re looking for a scapegoat. (So IF a baby were to die, the state might try to blame the midwife … though in most cases the baby would have died in a hospital too.)

If the midwife wouldn’t be licensed, then I’m not sure who you’d get to do it. Otherwise you might have to sign a release form that means she’s not responsible for anything that might happen.

As long as you’re having a healthy pregnancy and are educated on the signs and possible complications of pregnancy and labor, you should probably be fine. And make sure you’re able to get to a hospital quickly just in case.

You could also hire a doula as well, someone who is experienced in childbirth and has had her own children. But they are not medical professionals, just someone who can assist you during labor with non-medical issues. Depending on how much time you have, I would read everything I could get my hands on regarding unassisted home births and talk to as many people as possible about it – those who have done it, BTW, not people who think it’s impossible without ever having experienced it themselves.

Good luck and God bless.

I think that you best bet is to ask some other like minded individuals you will get a huge bunch of people on here telling you that UC is the worst thing you could try that its dangerous e.c.t.. go to Yahoo groups and search for either Unassisted childbirth, (there is a groups called C-birth that are really friendly) and also search for homebirth groups in your local area on Yahoo too.
You should find quite alot of info from those groups once you have joined (let say the*your local area* homebirth group) ask them the same question and ask if anyone knows of a homebirth midwife, even if Homebirth in your state is unregulated, you still need to make sure that the midwife you pick is either CNM or CPM you can go to MANA.org to research what kind of qualifications different midwives have then this page http://cfmidwifery.org/find/ is where you can do a search to find a midwife in your local area, most CPM in unregulated states practice under the radar and can be hard to find but if you ask the right people the right questions you can find one Im sure.. here are a couple more midwifery sites that you might find useful. if you need any further assistance or are having problems finding the info you need let me know I will do what I can to help