I would like to thank you for your coverage of the recent attack by the State of Illinois on midwifery care headlined “State crackdown on midwives hits home with moms,” by Sue Ellen Christian and Cornelia Grumman (Page 1, Sept. 14).
I am a mother, and like most mothers, I do my homework when it concerns my children. Midwifery care is a safe choice for birthing families. At its foundation is the core belief that pregnancy and birth are normal physiological life events. The midwife’s role, in my understanding, is to provide prenatal care and continuous hands-on assistance to the woman birthing her child.
Dr. LeRoy Sprang, chairman of the board of the Illinois State Medical Society, is concerned about the welfare of mothers and infants in childbirth. Of course he is. Why else would he have become an obstetrician if not for his concern for the welfare of mothers and their children. He is wrong, however, to assume that the technological advancements and surgical skills present at the hospital make childbirth automatically safer for mother and baby.
In a comparative study using equally matched planned home-birth women and planned hospital-birth women, Dr. Lewis Mehl found in 1980 that not only was home birth safe, it was safer for mothers and babies. The World Health Organization recommends that the care during normal pregnancy, birth and postnatal period should be the duty of professional midwives and that their training should be encouraged.
According to one WHO official, “Every single country in the European Region of WHO with perinatal and infant mortality rates lower than the United States (which ranks 24th in the world) uses midwives as the principal and only birth attendant for at least 70 percent of births (i.e., there is no physician in the room).”
With only three states carrying higher infant mortality rates, Illinois should get its head out of the AMA’s agenda and prick up its ears. I am outraged that the state is barring me and other families from the safe care of these professional midwives.
