Learn what a Midwifery Today Online Membership can do for you. = Membership Article.
Photo by Dakota Corbin
When I entered the world of birth and midwifery in 1985, pregnant with my first child and determined to have a natural birth, there was no internet, no social media, and no famous overnight “influencers,” as we know them today.
The good news is that midwives are receiving recognition for our work! The World Health Organization has proclaimed “The Decade of the Midwife” from 2021 to 2030. This will help midwives serve mothers and babies, to the best of our capabilities, to keep them safe in the passage of childbirth.
Photo by Neal E. Johnson
Wisdom of the Midwives: The Future of Midwifery – Issue 139
How do you see the future of midwifery going forward? Do you feel fairly positive about it?
Tricks of the Trade – Issue 139
Kitchen Remedies
Pregnancy Complications in Older Mothers
Assisting Anterior Rotation during Labor
On Christmas Day a few years ago, I was having dinner with my family but I was on-call for an expectant mama—and I got the call letting me know her labor had started. I hopped in my car and drove northeast from the San Francisco Bay Area toward Sacramento, taking the appropriate exits from I-80 to the backroads that led to a nice suburban house where the kind-hearted couple were waiting for me to arrive.
Read more…. Narrative Medicine and the Renewal of Midwifery Practice in the Twenty-first Century
Photo by Andrew Seaman
To have a meaningful discussion about the future of midwifery education, we must consider the question: what is a midwife? To understand what a midwife is we need to ask ourselves some other important questions. First, who created midwifery? Second, what do midwives do? And finally, the most important question of all: exactly who “owns” human reproduction? Only after we answer these important questions can we start to analyze and develop a plan to educate the midwives of the future and begin to truly address the huge crisis we have in maternal and child health care today.
Rebecca Grummett—wmgphotography.com
Photo Album – Issue 139
Baby’s Name: Remi Alex Shea
Parents: Winnie and Cody
Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada • January 2021 • 2:05 am
Holding the sacred for new mothers as Village Midwife.
Photos provided by author
The Village Midwife is not lost. Her blood runs thick in our veins. Our great-great-grandmothers knew her ways. Many of them were her.
Photos by Ian Penwell
The most exciting thing to me about the future of midwifery is the non-traditional nature of midwifery education in America and the potential it has to become a model for the world. Student midwives can train by apprenticeship at the same time they also earn college degrees in midwifery, without ever leaving their home community. This is a game-changer.
Read more…. Future-Thinking Midwifery Education: Birthing the Midwives We Need
Photo by NASA
Numerous studies have been done researching the impact of stress on birthing women and how it can affect labor and the newborn. Statistics continue to confirm the relationship of cortisol and adrenaline with an increase in postpartum hemorrhage, fetal distress in labor, and the need for post-birth resuscitative measures. This is not that kind of article.
Read more…. Weaving the Sacred into Clinical Practice in the Wake of a Global Pandemic
Photo by Michael Anfang
I am beginning to feel a little like Forrest Gump when he said, “My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” I would change it to “Birth is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get!”
Photo by Aditya Romansa
I wish I could show you the VHS (a type of videotape) I have from back in the day when there were no cell phones with which to film births. It is of the birth of Gregory, an almost-10 lb first baby born to a couple in my area. The birth was lovely.
