North Carolina Midwifery Study Commission in the news!

In North Carolina, the legislature has commissioned a study group to look at the issues surrounding home birth and the certified professional midwife. An Indyweek.com article says, in part,

"The study committee was the way birth reformists sought to get around a seeming impasse: For the better part of a decade, the leadership in the state House and Senate has agreed to pass legislation legalizing direct-entry midwives if and only if the North Carolina Medical Society would sign off.

'That is a perfectly understandable position, but it's just not going to work,' Fawcett said. 'They are not going to agree, and never have.'"

Russ Fawcett is right. It doesn't matter what evidence you have, or how many individual doctors support licensing certified professional midwives. The doctors' groups are intent on grabbing every penny of their $33 BILLLION dollar obstetrics industry, and organized medicine is fighting back hard.

The doctors don't play a clean game, though, and instead insist on misrepresenting the facts in order to scare legislators into voting for them. Until licensed professions are no longer allowed to make large campaign contributions, to state officials and lawmakers, they will keep their deathgrip on healthcare.

The reason that these midwifery groups are able to gain any traction is that -- in a true grassroots movement that's growing across the country -- home birth mothers and fathers are refusing to buckle in, and are storming state capitols en masse, to demand their right to a safe home birth with a midwife.

You can read an unreferenced account of the "history" of midwifery in North Carolina, written from a nurse-midwifery perspective. It's interesting to note that in the early 20th century, North Carolina midwives suddenly had to receive "instruction" from doctors and nurses, but there's no mention that midwives at that were getting bad results (odds are they weren't; every study in the late 19th and early 20th centuries show midwives had superior outcomes to doctors of that same time). and I shudder to think what they "taught" the midwives -- probably to force the mother to lie down on her back (which actually impedes the birth process and increases the risk of fetal distress). I bet the midwives could have taught them a thing or two!