ABSTRACT
This chapter presents my story, an autoethnographic account of how I came to disengage from a woman who had planned to have me as her home birth midwife. This is a personal account where I interrogate my actions and thoughts as research data, and analyse my story and its context. I examine the rhetoric of midwifery professionalism and apply it to my own and the Irish home birth context. The chapter serves three purposes: one, to tell my story; two, to argue that my story, as an exemplar of autoethnography, can be presented as research; and three, to explore the concept of professionalism within midwifery.
