Hearing the word midwife leaves many people thinking of unprofessional, inexperienced women who help deliver babies naturally, without the help of medication. In truth, nurse-midwives are registered nurses who have attended additional schooling for women’s health and are taught to make women feel as comfortable as possible. In the beginning, remedies were the females’ legacies, their “birthright”; these females were known as “wise-women by the people, witches of charlatans by authorities”. (Ehrenreich, 1973). “Females were wanderers, traveling from one place to another, healing the sick and wounded.” (Ehrenreich 1973). These women were among the first human healers and they were especially helpful when it came to childbearing. The midwives had many remedies for common treatments, including ones that dealt with childbirth. “Countless types of their remedies are still in use today by our own pharmaceutical companies”. (Ehrenreich, 1973). As time progressed, the women had to fight long and hard for their rights; the right to vote, the right to work, and the right to go to school. In earlier centuries and even a couple of measly decades ago, many of those rights were denied to females. Men ruled the world, and with it, the women. They were the priests, the household heads, basically the alpha dogs which left the women in charge of the house and the kids. They were the physicians of their time and that was all they had. As stated above, midwives were the original OB/GYNs, their medicine is still being used, indirectly, to this very day, and they still found ways to keep improving their amenities by “providing the same services your OB/GYN would offer.” (Doherty, 2010). By informing Americans about the education of Certified Nurse-Midwives, their services, and the dramatic cost differences between them and the OB/GYNs, more people would be enticed to try their services and employ all of the options available to them.
MD Marden Wagner said, “In every country where I have seen real progress in maternity care, it was woman’s groups working together with midwives that made the difference.” The Marriam Webster dictionary defines midwifery as “The art or act of assisting at childbirth”. The definition is a spot-on explanation. Midwifery is not very broad; it’s pinpointed as a specific job with detailed instructions that only deal with pregnancies. Many will argue to say that midwives only work with women who are having “normal-pregnancies”.(Goer, 2002). Normal pregnancies include a healthy mother and fetus, with no complications. “Approximately 10% - 30% of pregnant women will experience Bacterial Vaginosis (BV) during their pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy happens in 1 out of 60 pregnancies. About 1% of all pregnant women will experience placental abruption, and most can be successfully treated depending on what type of separation occurs.” (Pregnancy Complications). Everyone is different, they handle pain in different ways, they have diverse fingerprints, they all have their own unique genetic material; evidently all pregnant women will experience each pregnancy they have differently from themselves and from other women. Many people will argue about the authenticity of a Certified Nurse Midwife’s education however, in reality “Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNM) are registered nurses, with a minimum of a Master’s degree and have graduated from a nurse midwifery education program accredited by the ACME. They must pass a national certification exam offered by the AMCB to become licensed by the state in which they practice.” (Harvard). After four years spent receiving a baccalaureate degree, CNMs must spend an additional 2-3 years to receive their Masters’ degree, giving them a total of six to seven years of schooling, therefore making them more than eligible to do their job.
On another note, when some people think of midwives, they think of women who work together to help bring a baby into this world but the truth of the matter is that
