Skip to main content

Making Room for Midwives

Make Room for Midwives
Monday, August 1, 2016 - 2:30pm

Midwives aren’t often featured in The Green Journal, the official publication of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, but the authors of an article published in the current issue are hoping to change that.

Chitra Akileswaran, MD, MBS and Margaret Hutchison, CNM, MSN co-wrote PDF icon Making Room at the Table for Obstetrics, Midwifery, and a Culture of Normalcy Within Maternity Care.pdf. They hope that seating more midwives at the tables where maternal healthcare decisions are made will improve childbirth practices for all women. Read the Every Mother Counts: Making Room for Midwives blog story and interview with co-author Margy Hutchison here.

The article proposes that the medical model that we use for maternal health care in the U.S. is based on the principle that childbirth is dangerous for some women. It leads with the premise that using a variety of medical interventions on all women will help us avoid the worst possible outcomes and reduce morbidity and mortality in childbirth. That principal worked well during the 20th Century, but medical technologies have evolved and medical systems have become more complicated. We now routinely use layers of medical interventions and technologies on even low-risk pregnancies and we’re seeing increasingly poor results.