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Questions
about Midwifery
What
kind of things do midwives have to learn?
I
had been a labor and delivery nurse for a long time before I
went to midwifery
school, and, although there are exceptions, this is the
most common situation. I’d already delivered maybe 50-100
babies in the hospital, times when the doctor arrived too late.
But in midwifery school, I learned to give prenatal care, repair
episiotomies and lacerations, do physical exams on newborns,
and perform annual well-woman exams, none of which were skills
I would have learned as a delivery room nurse.
How
many certified nurse
midwives are there in the US, and how many of them do home
births?
There
are currently (2000) about 5500 midwives in active practice
in the United States.
In 1997, 258,000 babies were delivered by midwives. 6.6% of
total births in the U.S. that year were done by midwives (compared
to 75% in Europe). 248,800 done in hospitals, and 2,654 were
home births.
About 14,000 home births were done by direct-entry
midwives, but the data is skewed due to false reporting.
Some of this error is the fault of individual states which insist
that only licensed practitioners may sign birth certificates,
which makes it appear as though births done by skilled but unlicensed
midwives were unattended, do-it-yourself affairs.
If
someone is interested in becoming a midwife, where should she
go to get information?
A
good place to start is with the Midwifery Today website:
www.midwiferytoday.com/books/paths.asp
The editor, Jan
Tritten, has written a booklet called
Paths to Becoming a Midwife that helps prospective
midwives make sense of the many options available to them.
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