First, we need to bludgeon the idiots who govern us into realizing that there is a problem. From
Eleanor J. Bader at Truthout:
According to Amnesty International, the US presently ranks 50th in terms of safe labor and delivery. Said another way, this means that women in 49 countries have better birth outcomes than women in the US of A. "Deadly Delivery," a 2010 Amnesty study that was updated last year, reports that despite annual expenditures of $98 billion, 12.7 of every 100,000 American women die in childbirth. Predictably, if we look at communities of color, rather than overall numbers, the findings are worse: Women of color are three to four times more likely to die giving birth than their white counterparts.
The US is the wealthiest nation in the world, and spends obscene amounts ($98 billion annually) on hospital delivery of babies. And our outcomes are worse, for mother and/or infant, than those of 49 other countries. About one-third of babies are delivered by C-section, more than twice the World Health Organization's nominal recommendation... again at greater (and often needless) risk to mother and baby.
Why do we do this? Why do we even permit this? Take a look back to the 19
th and 20
th centuries:
...
... According to Ina May Gaskin, winner of the 2011 Right Livelihood Award - aka The Alternative Nobel Prize - and the so-called "mother of modern midwifery," midwifery fell out of favor following its demonization in the decades after the Civil War. "Midwifery was destroyed a century ago, in large part, because US midwives had not organized and established midwifery as a profession. The anti-midwife propaganda campaign carried out by organized medicine was not countered by any collective argument from midwives. This is why medicine was able to destroy midwifery with so little expense and effort," her web site states. Add that era's pervasive xenophobia and the fact that most midwives were European-born and trained and you had an ample breeding ground for political backlash. In addition, doctors argued that the pain of childbirth would be diminished if "modern" obstetricians in "modern" facilities handled it. The campaign worked: By the middle of the 20th century, most states had outlawed midwifery, and in-hospital births, attended by university-trained male physicians, became the norm. Female midwives, who had practiced for decades, were shunted aside.
...
I once worked as a programmer on a study of the effects of drugs prescribed to and taken by pregnant women on their fetuses, as measured in the blood of their newborn babies. The drug concentrations were many times the therapeutic dose for an infant of that size, even assuming the drugs were suitable for infants, which was not a reliable assumption. That's part of what "modern medicine" did for childbirth.
But... would you want your wife or daughter assisted by a nonprofessional? What a load of hooey... certified midwives, both Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) and Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs)
ARE trained medical professionals, qualified to deal with many circumstances, veterans of at least 1,350 hours of clinical experience during their training, and trained to recognize those pathological cases in which a woman must be hospitalized.
Despite that, CPMs are disallowed in 23 states, sometimes (e.g., in Indiana) arrested and charged with "practicing medicine without a license."
Put this in context: we are the wealthiest nation on Earth, and according to Amnesty,
our pregnancy outcomes rank 50th among nations. This was not the case in the first half of the 20
th century, when midwife-assisted home birth was common. Today, fewer than 1% of babies are born anywhere but in a hospital. As many rural hospitals have closed their maternity wings to save cost,
many rural mothers have no access to any kind of birthing assistance at all. Do you think, perhaps, there might be a connection between the lack of midwives and the high rate of birth-related problems in America? and also a connection to the higher rate of C-sections performed? And it's all so hospitals and doctors can make more money.
"America's the greatest land of all." It must be so: the late great Dinah Shore sang it, advertising Chevrolet. I suppose that modern truth-in-advertising laws would require a list of qualifiers similar to those on drug ads. The banning of certified midwifery would surely be among those qualifiers.
