The Protection of midwives

21 August 2007

I've arrived in the UK and will start my bike trip on Sunday.

Our new shopping cart is up and running! Wow!

Got an email from a woman who works as a midwife in the UK and says that midwives are being threatened by loss of health insurance. That's sad. This was my response and I hope people understand what I'm trying to say as a trustee to Common Knowledge Trust.

You know I arrived in NZ when midwives were 'fighting for their survival' and was told bluntly that they couldn't put any time into the concept of growing a skilled birthing population because their own survival was more paramount ... so they didn't. Now their survival is threatened because the c/s rate and other interventions has more than doubled under their exclusive care.

What I don't understand and probably never will is why not spend some active amount of time and energy encouraging a societal belief that when you are pregnant you need to learn to birth and your partner to know how to coach (help) you? Isn't it worth growing a skilled birthing population so that ultimately and down the road, we, as expectant parents, come to understand that part of our responsibility and job as parents is to know how to prepare our body for birth and learn the skills so we can work with our baby's efforts to be born.

What Andrea and Suzie discovered is that couples had hugely better births and were less pissed off once they had taken that responsibility. You know that part of law suits has to do with dissatisfaction or a belief that someone has done something to you or should have.

I'll go to my grave knowing at the core of my being that a skilled birthing population is what ultimately supports a midwifery model because I know the time and energy hundreds of families put into doing just that in the 1970s and how that had a positive impact on all their birth providers. I'll probably go to my grave sorry that women who work as midwives never understood that or worked toward it. I always feel badly that midwives feel so alone when it's not necessary.

That just about says it all. It seems to me that women who work as midwives are internally focused on their profession when some of their time and energy should also go toward stimulating a new societal expectation ... learn how to birth ... whatever your birth.

Anyway, I'll be on the road from 26 August - 26 Sept. I'll have to see about keeping this blog going. I doubt people want to know about my bike trip but conversations keep happening.

visit our new shopping cart at http://www.thepinkkit.com

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Tell him Wintergreen recommended him. He's absolutely the most sophisticated webmaster our Trust has ever worked with.