My Midwife
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Childbirth
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Midwifery News
Letter:
Midwife decision a loss to community
House
passes Idaho midwife licensing bill
The WATERBIRTH
video!
HOW TO TALK
TO YOUR LEGISLATORS
IINFANT
DEATHS TO BIRTH COHORTS,
BY TYPE OF ATTENDANT, ILLINOIS
Q&A about
Midwives
The
Childbirth Monopoly: Why the medical industry is dragging its feet when it comes to
midwives.
This site is intended to help you
educate yourself and others about the choice of midwifery and homebirth. Families need to
be aware of birthing options. Midwifery is a model of care which includes good nutrition,
skillful midwifery, natural childbirth, homebirth and breastfeeding.
David Stewart, PhD, wrote in The Five Standards for Safe
Childbearing that "more than a million American babies have died since 1940 who
would have lived were it not for doctors and hospitals -- babies that would have
been born alive and healthy at home with a midwife."
Most Americans think that childbirth has always taken
place in the hospital with doctors, but this is not so. Physician-attended hospital birth
is a 20th century phenomena initiated by the rich and powerful at a time when women
did not have the right to vote!
Copy and use my researched
articles. Buy a copy of my video or ask your library, school, college, health department
or other entity to purchase a copy. Invite interested people to an educational
get-together. You can do it! Use my video and accompanying reproducible handouts to begin.
Together, we can change American birth practices and demand public policy that
"allows the profession of midwifery to develop fully, independently, and in its
rightful place -- the home."
" ...Since home birth and direct entry
midwifery are perfectly safe options, (a majority of) State legislatures have concluded
that it is the right of each woman and her family to choose such options. State laws must
guarantee families the freedom to choose home birth by recognizing the type of midwifery
which focuses principally on out-of-hospital birth, direct entry midwifery."
"State legislatures are also concerned with guaranteeing an open
marketplace and fair competition, including in health care services. To exclude direct
entry midwives from practice is to allow a scientifically unjustified monopoly of doctors
and nurse midwives... "
-Marsden Wagner, to the Va.JCHC, 1998
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