For the past five years or so I have listened with dismay to direct entry
midwives criticizing nurse-midwives as "medwives" and physician extenders"
and to nurse-midwives talking about professional direct entry midwives as
if they don't know very much, and working in some states to pass
exclusionary laws.
Such behavior is a classic feature of oppressed groups who turn on each
other instead of concentrating on fighting their oppressors. An oppressed
group will tend to want to fight its battle for identity and survival
against members of other, often similar, groups. The group that is closer
to full cultural integration will want to protect that position, jealously
guarding its hard-won toehold in the technocracy, while the more
marginalized group will tend to regard the more integrated group as a bunch
of traitors who have compromised their ideals and values to get into the
system. Both attitudes are exclusionary, and both are counter-productive,
because they work to keep apart people with common interests who could
benefit from working together in their struggle against the larger system.
For the past several years I have been actively conducting research on
midwifery education and politics in the United States and Mexico. ... I
found first that most midwives who expressed negative opinions about "that
other kind of midwife" had very little or no personal or professional
exposure to those other midwives, but rather were forming opinions based on
stereotypes or the opinions of others; and second, that every midwife who
had positive opinions about "the other kind" of midwife did have direct
exposure to those other midwives, personally and professionally, either
through watching them practice or through time spent together in monthly
potluck dinners, joint conferences, and the like.
-Robbie Davis-Floyd, Ph.D., Midwifery Today Issue 49
Reprinted from Midwifery Today E-News (Vol 2 Issue 6 February 11, 2000)
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