A Birth Center on Every Corner Please

Midwife?
You want to be a what?
What is that? I ask
Conversation when I was 21
graduated college Detroit
Moved to Wyoming
Working first job
Hospital
A registered nurse

Midwives
With women
Serving women
Protecting women
Are women

Wise women
Burned, hunted, tortured
Knowledge lost
Disallowed education
Disallowed fair compensation

Midwives honor
Women
Choice
Birth
Life

Women
Wise women
Knowing women

Food, Love, Respect
For women
For life

Compassion, Understanding
For women
For life
For choice

Midwife on every corner please

Already RN,
Have to become
CNM
Graduate school

Hospital again
This is awful
This is terrible
This is inhumane
Women and babies
Abused and neglected
Physically
Emotionally
Psychologically
By labor wards
Now decoyed with family birth rooms
It doesn’t have to be this way I ranted
Till one day

AH HA!!!
What way can it be?
Took under her wing by master self taught midwife
13 pregnancies
6 children, 2 medio lateral episiotomies
Then homebirths for her

She knew how to get babies out
Nourish and love women up
Encouraging their nutrition
Loving their families
Or providing protection from him

Guiding Guardians
Midwives
Serving women

Now still with some PTSD
from hospital work as nurse and then midwife
Now attending conferences
International Confederation of Midwives triennial
American College of Nurse Midwives
Midwives alliance of north America
Facilitating bridging the midwives
Speaking out
Getting standing ovations
Motions passed
National committees homebirth
Standards
Legislation

Women, birth, hospitals
30-90% major abdominal surgery
Unnecessary inductions
Dangerous practices based on their patriarchal beliefs
of what should be DONE TO women
Mass mutilation and neglect of women
Physically
Emotionally
Babies too
Carry this abuse and neglect into adulthood
Pre and Perinatal Psychology

Midwifery Today Summit
Birth as a Human Right
Choice to birth with whom and where you desire
Just last week!
Midwives consumers lawyers
Working together
Collaborating
To stop the persecution of
Midwives
Still today, in the USA
And to
Provide Access to midwives
To compensate midwives

When midwives have to follow doctors
Ignorance, fear, greed, arrogance
Who rule hospitals and insurance companies
And government opinion
Then midwives cannot be midwives

Oregon Vital Statistics
45,000 hospital births
Hospital 20-30% cesarean births
Home and Free Standing Birth Center 3-10% Cesarean
If just 10% of 45,000 paid for out of hospital
$32 million saved from hospital fee and surgical fee
Consider the savings for the country-billions of $$

Midwives protect
When midwives are the leaders
A Birth Center on Every Corner Please