Contact CEO Last Updated ~ Wednesday February 16, 2011 01:34
Return to Index page CEO's relationship to the "midwife Problem"
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Due to the historical agenda of organized medicine and the conventions of tort law, midwives are currently the only maternity care providers that are trained, skilled, experienced and able to utilize the physiologic principles in the care of healthy women with normal pregnancies. The ethical response to this dilemma would be for medical schools to teach the philosophy and principles of physiological management to medical students, practicing physicians learn and use the strategies of physiological management and insurance companies to reimburse obstetricians for this safe and cost-effective care. A long over-due and much needed reform of our national health care policy would integrate physiological principles with the best advances in obstetrical medicine to create a single, evidence-based standard for all healthy women.
However, that isn't what is happening. Instead, healthy childbearing families, hospital-based midwifery programs and professional midwives of all background face extremely serious problems under our highly politicalized and deeply dysfunctional system. Cesarean section has become the 'pre-emptive' strike of choice; A-COG is shameless pushing the scheduled CS as the safest form of delivery. This promotes the fallacious notion that other options chosen by mothers and/or midwives equate to negligent care or a criminal act of child abuse.
The historical 'midwife problem ' has now become the midwife/mother/childbearing family problem. In additions to the usual suspects (the decades-long prosecution /persecution of midwives) new injustices arise almost daily. Hospital-based nurse-midwifery practices and training programs have been summarily closed, independent birth centers on the East Coast have put out of business en masse, court-ordered CS and reporting of parents to child protective services are all on the rise. Criminal prosecutions (including homicide charges) are being filed against childbearing women who make medically-unpopular choices. Where will it end?
The issues are plain and straightforward -- the independent practice of midwifery, science-based maternity care as the foremost standard for normal childbirth and the constitutional right of competent adult women to have control over the manner and circumstances of pregnancy and normal birth. However, these issues cannot be resolved from within this same dysfunctional system. "More of what's not working, will not work either". A hundred years of failed efforts has amply demonstrated this impossibility. Politically-speaking, we do not have the elements of success under the present circumstance. We must change public perception in order to change the politics. We must win in the court of public opinion.
Story with a happy ending...
The only way that mothers and midwives can be repatriated to their constitutionally appropriate status is to fix the real problem -- the uncritical acceptance of an unscientific premise or interventionist obstetrics for health women. This hundred-years old failed medical experiment must be replaced with an evidence-based and cost-effective model of mother-baby-father friendly maternity care. After that is done, the so-called 'midwife problem' will resolve itself on its own merits. Nothing else will work.
So we urge midwives, students and midwifery clients to join CEO in its effort to end flat earth obstetrics. Write a letter to First Lady Maria Shirver today. Tell everyone else to write letters to Maria Shriver and ask your favorite organization, church group, etc., to join our Consortium. Let Donna Russell of CCfHF know that you are out there and you wanted to be counted as a warrior for the rights of women, babies and a compassionate, cost-effective healthcare system.
The new web site, with all the info, is www.ScienceBasedBirth.com Check it out and pass it on person-to-person. Forward the website URL to your email groups.
