The military has more than 70 midwives, according to military health officials. These registered nurses do much of the same work as gynecologists and obstetricians — providing prenatal care, performing women’s wellness exams, administering birth control and delivering some of the thousands of babies born in military facilities each year.

More than 23,000 babies are born annually in Army facilities, spokeswoman Margaret Tippy said. The Air Force handles 8,000 births each year, according to one official.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=60225

Two major health care organizations have joined the growing number of groups calling on policy makers to increase access to Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) and out-of-hospital maternity care. Acknowledging the large body of evidence supporting the safety of home delivery with CPMs, who are specifically trained to care for mothers and babies in out-of-hospital settings, nursing and perinatal health care organizations criticized the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) resolutions calling for bans on CPMs and home birth. The groups also joined Consumer Reports magazine in highlighting the need for a major overhaul of the U.S. maternity care system.

http://apps.facebook.com/causes/posts/131560?m=7d290bcb

Right before Thanksgiving, Ricki and I got to fulfill a dream…visiting Ina May Gaskin at The Farm in Tennessee. We had always wanted to film Ina May at The Farm for BOBB but ran out of production funds and time. We decided that we MUST get there to film for our follow-up DVD, so Wednesday morning November 19th (mere hours after Ricki hosted a benefit at Babeland for The New Space for Women’s Health) we hopped a plane to Nashville.

http://www.thebusinessofbeingborn.com/blog/2008/12/09/down-on-the-farm/

Stanislawa was arrested in Lodz on February 18, 1943, with her daughter and two sons. The sons were sent to the labor camp at Mathausen and Gusen to work in the stone quarries. She and her daughter, Sylvia, were sent to Auschwitz where they arrived on April 17, 1943. They were given the numbers 41335 and 41336, tattooed on their forearms. They would remain as mementos of the camp.

They were deprived of all possessions, stripped, shaven, and given camp clothing – striped overalls and some underwear. Sylvia recalls that she received two left-foot slip. All of the clothing was infested with lice. Stanislawa spent two years in the women’s facility at Auschwitz, working as a midwife in three different blocks. The “sick-ward” in all of these was the same: 40-meter long bare wooden barracks heated by single brick stove.

http://www.4marks.com/articles/details.html?article_id=2593

Commentator Kristal Brent Zook says there are a lot of lessons medical practitioners could learn from African-American midwife traditions. Zook is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing writer for Essence magazine.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5061075

Audio: http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=5061075&m=5061076

You’d think the healthcare establishment would have bigger fish to fry than Ricki Lake. (The 47 million uninsured, maybe?) But Lake’s recent documentary, “The Business of Being Born,” which includes footage of her own delivery of her second child at home, was on the agenda at the American Medical Assn.’s annual meeting in mid-June. Lake was personally name-checked in a “Resolution on Home Deliveries” introduced by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: “Whereas, there has been much attention in the media by celebrities having home deliveries, with recent ‘Today Show’ headings such as ‘Ricki Lake takes on baby birthing industry.’ ” The AMA ultimately passed the resolution without the Lake citation, but not before the Hollywood media got wind of it and, overnight, home birth was thrust into the mainstream light.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-block9-2008jul09,0,3357453.story

When will we remember that pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation are normal healthy physiological processes that are a continuum and do not require medical intervention unless there is a medical problem? A woman’s body and the physiology of pregnancy, labor, birth, and lactation are designed to promote the well-being of the fetus and newborn. When will we establish optimal outcomes as the goal of health care during the childbearing cycle, rather than attempting to reduce by small increments the incidence of morbidity and mortality that is compounded by the very interventions we use to attempt to avoid such problems? We all know that in our current health care milieu for childbearing women, the protection of normal is not valued or supported, except in a very few locales.

http://icantwincitiesblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/acog-under-question-by-insider.html

We are proud to announce that Alison Haasch, owner of NaturalChildbirth.org, is now a licensed midwife in the state of Arizona. Alison has been training and working with midwives Pamela Qualls and Sue DiSilvestro for the past several years.

Alison has started her new midwifery business under the name of LifeSpring Midwifery, LLC. She will be offering comprehensive midwifery care specializing in natural home birth, childbirth education, breastfeeding, and well woman care in the Phoenix, Arizona area.

Alison Haasch is currently taking Arizona midwifery clients in Phoenix, Tempe, Scottsdale, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Fountain Hills, Maricopa, Casa Grande, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, and Florence.

LifeSpring Midwifery, LLC

Alison Haasch, Licensed Midwife - Phoenix, Arizona

Breastfeeding has been known to benefit a baby’s health in numerous ways, including lowering the risk of asthma, and other illnesses and disorders, later in life.

It also has psychological benefits.

“We know that the breastfeeding creates a bond between the mother and the baby which lasts forever and ever,” notes Edith Kernerman, lactation consultant.

http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_31487.aspx

As a step toward our goal of educating women about their choices and options, we are soliciting short videos about evidence-based maternity and delivery care. We want videos that will appeal to and inspire new audiences that may not have previously been exposed to any model of childbirth other than the version we see on television and in movies: dangerous, uncertain, excruciating, and usually in need of extensive and often emergency medical interventions. Birth doesn’t have to be this scary, and people need good information in order to make good choices.

We are thrilled to announce guest judges:
Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein, acclaimed producers of The Business of Being Born.
Sarah Buckley, M.D., international birth expert and author of Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering.

The first-place winner will receive a cash prize of $1000. Second place: $500 and Honorable Mention: $100.

Deadline for Entry is 11:59pm on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2009

http://www.birthmattersva.org/videocontest.html

Jan 28, 2009, California – A series of life-sized photographs of women breastfeeding their babies, cut-out and plastered on poster board, are going to be displayed over Marin County starting today. It’s part of an eye-catching campaign to encourage breastfeeding and promote the acceptance of breastfeeding in public. The campaign will expand to the rest of the county in the coming weeks.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/health/women/Breastfeeding-Campaign-Goes-Live-in-Marin.html

When actress and producer Salma Hayek arrived in Sierra Leone in September, she was not whisked off to a movie set. She was there not as a celebrity, but as a humanitarian, to see firsthand a leading cause of death in the developing world: tetanus. “Nightline” co-anchor Cynthia McFadden went along to document the journey.

http://a.abcnews.com/Entertainment/story?id=6804291&page=1

We need our children to see breasts being used to feed babies. This is not gross or obscene. It is normal and we need to teach them that it is normal. Recent episodes of children’s TV shows like Sesame Street have been criticized by pro-breastfeeding organizations like ProMOM and by individual reviewers on Amazon for only showing bottle-fed babies and not showing nursing babies.

But it wasn’t always like that. Children’s TV shows used to teach children about the role of breasts in feeding babies.

http://www.phdinparenting.com/2009/02/07/breastfeeding-on-childrens-television/

An effort to protect breastfeeding mothers is being revived at the Capitol.

Proposed legislation would protect the rights of a mother to breastfeed her child in public. State Senator Fred Risser (D-Madison) says there’s no law against it right now, but some mothers still face problems because there are also no laws in place that clearly protect them. Risser says he’s heard from many mothers that have been harassed for breastfeeding their child in a public place.

http://www.wrn.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=4D9B947A-5056-B82A-374625EE0337C9DB

The idea of taking genetic profiles for babies is not new. The issue was raised as a possibility in the government’s genetics white paper in 2003. Back then, the thinking was that the information would reveal a person’s risk of disease later in life, and potentially pave the way for treatment tailored to a patient’s genetic make-up.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/feb/09/genetics-controversiesinscience

The context of midwifery education and Second Life
Published by Sarah Stewart on Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 2:18 PM

As the regular readers of this blog will know, I am lead educator in a project to set up a virtual birthing unit in Second Life as a teaching tool for student midwives. I haven’t written about the project for a couple of weeks because we have been busy thinking, discussing and working through process issues.

I feel we have gone round and round in circles a number of times, but that is to be expected in a project of this size, and considering the diversity of people involved. So if you are going to start a project like this, make sure you factor in time for the ‘process’ that people have to go through with regards to decision-making before work can start.

http://sarah-stewart.blogspot.com/2009/02/context-of-midwifery-education-and.html

Two recent studies–one still in press–that I find quite fascinating relating to uterine rupture. I have the full text of the first one, and hope to access the second one* as soon as it is officially published. As always, email me if you’d like to take a look at the full text.

A few comments/questions/observations:

http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2009/02/cesarean-section-and-uterine-rupture.html

Concerns have been raised about pregnant women being induced “unnecessarily”, after a Scottish audit of 17,000 births.

In more than a quarter of cases, researchers could not find a medical or other explanation for the procedure.

The Aberdeen University team said in the Journal of Public Health that rates of obstetric intervention were rising.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7833058.stm

A bill that would create a state board of midwifery and provide more options for women who wish to give birth at home has cleared the Wyoming Senate.

The bill heads to the House after passing the Senate 28-2 on Thursday.

Currently state law permits only certified nurse midwives. A certified nurse midwife is a nurse with a master’s degree who is licensed by the state Board of Nursing to deliver infants at homes.

http://montanac.com/news/bill-would-create-wyoming-board-of-midwifery/