Who Has The Real Power to Take Away a Midwife's License
That is a really good question. Who has the real power to sanction a midwife and revoke her credentials? The state midwife association's don't even know who has the real power. If most of you women are reading and thinking that NARM has the power you are so WRONG! NARM is only responsible for continual education of these midwives. Can you believe that? After speaking with Shannon Anton for the NARM accountability department on the phone late last night. She tells me that NARM helps the state midwife associations with conducting grievance meetings for parent who have midwife complaints but she advised me that they don't have the true power to take away the license.
She informed me that this would be a state level issue. Shannon actually told me that the grievance meeting is to help the midwife/s contribute more knowledge and scenarios to their profile help the midwife, definitely not to punish or discipline the midwife for actions, its to make her practice better.
So let me get this straight. Your making your practice better on the deaths of children that could have been saved. Your letting your midwives learn through death. That is absolutely disgusting and repulsing.
I read this earlier and had many thoughts how midwifery has steered away from the original ancient teachings.
Midwifery is a health care profession in which providers offer care to childbearing women during pregnancy, labor and birth, during the postpartum period, and between pregnancies. Practitioners also help care for the newborn and assist the mother with breastfeeding. They provide birth control, education and prescriptions for well-woman health care as well.
A practitioner of midwifery is known as a midwife, a term used in reference to both women and men, although most midwives are female.[1] In addition to providing care to women during pregnancy and birth, many midwives also provide primary care to women, well-woman care related to reproductive health, annual gynecological exams, family planning, and menopausal care.
Midwives are specialists in childbirth, postpartum, and well-woman health care. They are educated and trained to recognize the variations of normal progress of labor and deal with deviations from normal to discern and intervene in high risk situations. Midwifery is its own profession and in many developed nations is the entry point for maternity care having demonstrated safety, satisfying and cost-effectiveness for decades. In the US, more women utilize obstetricians, in contrast, who are specialists in illness related to childbearing and in surgery.[2] While obstetricians are medical doctors and provide surgery and instrumental deliveries in complex situations and provide care for women with health challenges and complicated pregnancies, midwives generally trust the developmental and physiologic process that is normal for most women, and utilize interventions as needed.[3]
Midwives refer women to specialists such as obstetricians or perinatologists in complications related to pregnancy and birth when a pregnant woman requires care beyond the midwives' scope of practice. In many parts of the world, these professions work in tandem to provide care to childbearing women. In others, only the midwife is available to provide care. Midwives are trained to handle certain more difficult deliveries, including breech births, twin births and births where the baby is in a posterior position, using non-invasive techniques.
For normal births, midwives offer care at a lower cost, use lower intervention rates, have lower mortality and morbidity as a result of fewer interventions, and fewer recovery complications.[4]
According to the definition of the International Confederation of Midwives, which has also been adopted by the World Health Organization and the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics:
The midwife has an important task in health counseling and education, not only for the woman, but also within the family and community. This work should involve antenatal education and preparation for parenthood and may extend to women's health, sexual or reproductive health and childcare, and to gain the knowledge to counteract the lack of pain relievers and antiseptics.[citation needed]
95% of midwives in the US are Certified Nurse Midwives and practice in hospitals. A midwife who is credentialed appropriately is qualified to practice in any setting including in the home, the community, hospitals, clinics or health units.[5][dead link][6]
I don't think the midwife I hired fit anywhere within the ancient teachings of midwifery. She is a IMPOSTER most definitely.
Midwives are mentioned in the Old Testament: Exodus, Chapter 1. The Bible describes how the children of Israel (Hebrews) were enslaved in Egypt and they multiplied greatly. The Egyptians became fearful of the potential power of so many Hebrews. Pharaoh, therefore, commanded the Hebrew midwives (named Shiphrah and Puah) to kill all male babies delivered to the Hebrew women. The midwives, however, "feared God" and disobeyed Pharaoh by allowing the male babies to live. When Pharaoh asked the midwives why they had disobeyed his orders, the midwives told him the Hebrew women had easier labors than Egyptian women and delivered their babies before the midwife arrived. "And God dealt well with the midwives" (Exodus, Chap. 1, verse 20).
In ancient Egypt, midwifery was a recognized female occupation, as attested by the Ebers Papyrus which dates from 1900 to 1550 BCE. Five columns of this papyrus deal with obstetrics and gynecology, especially concerning the acceleration of parturition and the birth prognosis of the newborn. The West car papyrus, dated to 1700 BCE, includes instructions for calculating the expected date of confinement and describes different styles of birth chairs. Bas reliefs in the royal birth rooms at Luxor and other temples also attest to the heavy presence of midwifery in this culture.[10]
Midwifery in Greco-Roman antiquity covered a wide range of women, including old women who continued folk medical traditions in the villages of the Roman Empire, trained midwives who garnered their knowledge from a variety of sources, and highly trained women who were considered female physicians.[11] However, there were certain characteristics desired in a “good” midwife, as described by the physician Soranus of Ephesus in the 2nd century. He states in his work, Gynecology, that “a suitable person will be literate, with her wits about her, possessed of a good memory, loving work, respectable and generally not unduly handicapped as regards her senses [i.e., sight, smell, hearing], sound of limb, robust, and, according to some people, endowed with long slim fingers and short nails at her fingertips.” Soranus also recommends that the midwife be of sympathetic disposition (although she need not have borne a child herself) and that she keep her hands soft for the comfort of both mother and child.[12] Pliny, another physician from this time, valued nobility and a quiet and inconspicuous disposition in a midwife.[13] A woman who possessed this combination of physique, virtue, skill, and education must have been difficult to find in antiquity. Consequently, there appears to have been three “grades” of midwives present in ancient times. The first was technically proficient; the second may have read some of the texts on obstetrics and gynecology; but the third was highly trained and reasonably considered a medical specialist with a concentration in midwifery.[13]
Agnodice or Agnodike (Gr. Ἀγνοδίκη) was the earliest historical, and likely apocryphal,[14] midwife mentioned among the ancient Greeks.[15]
Midwives were known by many different titles in antiquity, ranging from iatrinē (Gr. nurse), maia (Gr., midwife), obstetrix (Lat., obstetrician), and medica (Lat., doctor).[16] It appears as though midwifery was treated differently in the Eastern end of the Mediterranean basin as opposed to the West. In the East, some women advanced beyond the profession of midwife (maia) to that of gynaecologist (iatros gynaikeios, translated as women's doctor), for which formal training was required. Also, there were some gynecological tracts circulating in the medical and educated circles of the East that were written by women with Greek names, although these women were few in number. Based on these facts, it would appear that midwifery in the East was a respectable profession in which respectable women could earn their livelihoods and enough esteem to publish works read and cited by male physicians. In fact, a number of Roman legal provisions strongly suggest that midwives enjoyed status and remuneration comparable to that of male doctors.[12] One example of such a midwife is Salpe of Lemnos, who wrote on women’s diseases and was mentioned several times in the works of Pliny.[13]
However, in the Roman West, our knowledge of practicing midwives comes mainly from funerary epitaphs. Two hypotheses are suggested by looking at a small sample of these epitaphs. The first is the midwifery was not a profession to which freeborn women of families that had enjoyed free status of several generations were attracted; therefore it seems that most midwives were of servile origin. Second, since most of these funeral epitaphs describe the women as freed, it can be proposed that midwives were generally valued enough, and earned enough income, to be able to gain their freedom. It is not known from these epitaphs how certain slave women were selected for training as midwives. Slave girls may have been apprenticed, and it is most likely that mothers taught their daughters.[12]
The actual duties of the midwife in antiquity consisted mainly of assisting in the birthing process, although they may also have helped with other medical problems relating to women when needed. Often, the midwife would call for the assistance of a physician when a more difficult birth was anticipated. In many cases the midwife brought along two or three assistants.[17] In antiquity, it was believed by both midwives and physicians that a normal delivery was made easier when a woman sat upright. Therefore, during parturition, midwives brought a stool to the home where the delivery was to take place. In the seat of the birthstool was a crescent-shaped hole through which the baby would be delivered. The birthstool or chair often had armrests for the mother to grasp during the delivery. Most birthstools or chairs had backs which the patient could press against, but Soranus suggests that in some cases the chairs were backless and an assistant would stand behind the mother to support her.[12] The midwife sat facing the mother, encouraging and supporting her through the birth, perhaps offering instruction on breathing and pushing, sometimes massaging her vaginal opening, and supporting her perineum during the delivery of the baby. The assistants may have helped by pushing downwards on the top of the mother's abdomen.
Finally, the midwife received the infant, placed it in pieces of cloth, cut the umbilical cord, and cleansed the baby.[13] The child was sprinkled with “fine and powdery salt, or natron or aphronitre” to soak up the birth residue, rinsed, and then powdered and rinsed again. Next, the midwives cleared away any and all mucus present from the nose, mouth, ears, or anus. Midwives were encouraged by Soranus to put olive oil in the baby’s eyes to cleanse away any birth residue, and to place a piece of wool soaked in olive oil over the umbilical cord. After the delivery, the midwife made the initial call on whether or not an infant was healthy and fit to rear. She inspected the newborn for congenital deformities and testing its cry to hear whether or not it was robust and hearty. Ultimately, midwives made a determination about the chances for an infant’s survival and likely recommended that a newborn with any severe deformities be exposed.[12]
A 2nd-century terracotta relief from the Ostian tomb of Scribonia Attice, wife of physician-surgeon M. Ulpius Amerimnus, details a childbirth scene. Scribonia was a midwife and the relief shows her in the midst of a delivery. A patient sits in the birth chair, gripping the handles and the midwife’s assistant stands behind her providing support. Scribonia sits on a low stool in front of the woman, modestly looking away while also assisting the delivery by dilating and massaging the vagina, as encouraged by Soranus.[13]
The services of a midwife were not inexpensive; this fact that suggests poorer women who could not afford the services of a professional midwife often had to make do with female relatives. Many wealthier families had their own midwives. However, the vast majority of women in the Greco-Roman world very likely received their maternity care from hired midwives. They may have been highly trained or possessed only a rudimentary knowledge of obstetrics. Also, many families had a choice of whether or not they wanted to employ a midwife who practiced the traditional folk medicine or the newer methods of professional parturition.[12] Like a lot of other factors in antiquity, quality gynecological care often depended heavily on the socioeconomic status of the patient.
site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwifery
She informed me that this would be a state level issue. Shannon actually told me that the grievance meeting is to help the midwife/s contribute more knowledge and scenarios to their profile help the midwife, definitely not to punish or discipline the midwife for actions, its to make her practice better.
So let me get this straight. Your making your practice better on the deaths of children that could have been saved. Your letting your midwives learn through death. That is absolutely disgusting and repulsing.
I read this earlier and had many thoughts how midwifery has steered away from the original ancient teachings.
Midwifery is a health care profession in which providers offer care to childbearing women during pregnancy, labor and birth, during the postpartum period, and between pregnancies. Practitioners also help care for the newborn and assist the mother with breastfeeding. They provide birth control, education and prescriptions for well-woman health care as well.
A practitioner of midwifery is known as a midwife, a term used in reference to both women and men, although most midwives are female.[1] In addition to providing care to women during pregnancy and birth, many midwives also provide primary care to women, well-woman care related to reproductive health, annual gynecological exams, family planning, and menopausal care.
Midwives are specialists in childbirth, postpartum, and well-woman health care. They are educated and trained to recognize the variations of normal progress of labor and deal with deviations from normal to discern and intervene in high risk situations. Midwifery is its own profession and in many developed nations is the entry point for maternity care having demonstrated safety, satisfying and cost-effectiveness for decades. In the US, more women utilize obstetricians, in contrast, who are specialists in illness related to childbearing and in surgery.[2] While obstetricians are medical doctors and provide surgery and instrumental deliveries in complex situations and provide care for women with health challenges and complicated pregnancies, midwives generally trust the developmental and physiologic process that is normal for most women, and utilize interventions as needed.[3]
Midwives refer women to specialists such as obstetricians or perinatologists in complications related to pregnancy and birth when a pregnant woman requires care beyond the midwives' scope of practice. In many parts of the world, these professions work in tandem to provide care to childbearing women. In others, only the midwife is available to provide care. Midwives are trained to handle certain more difficult deliveries, including breech births, twin births and births where the baby is in a posterior position, using non-invasive techniques.
For normal births, midwives offer care at a lower cost, use lower intervention rates, have lower mortality and morbidity as a result of fewer interventions, and fewer recovery complications.[4]
According to the definition of the International Confederation of Midwives, which has also been adopted by the World Health Organization and the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics:
A midwife is a person who, having been regularly admitted to a midwifery educational program that is duly recognized in the country in which it is located, has successfully completed the prescribed course of studies in midwifery and has acquired the requisite qualifications to be registered and/or legally licensed to practice midwifery.The midwife is recognized as a responsible and accountable professional who works in partnership with women to give the necessary support, care and advice during pregnancy, labor and the postpartum period, to conduct births on the midwife's own responsibility and to provide care for the infant. This care includes preventive measures, the promotion of normal birth, the detection of complications in mother and child, accessing of medical or other appropriate assistance and the carrying out of emergency measures.
The midwife has an important task in health counseling and education, not only for the woman, but also within the family and community. This work should involve antenatal education and preparation for parenthood and may extend to women's health, sexual or reproductive health and childcare, and to gain the knowledge to counteract the lack of pain relievers and antiseptics.[citation needed]
95% of midwives in the US are Certified Nurse Midwives and practice in hospitals. A midwife who is credentialed appropriately is qualified to practice in any setting including in the home, the community, hospitals, clinics or health units.[5][dead link][6]
I don't think the midwife I hired fit anywhere within the ancient teachings of midwifery. She is a IMPOSTER most definitely.
Midwives are mentioned in the Old Testament: Exodus, Chapter 1. The Bible describes how the children of Israel (Hebrews) were enslaved in Egypt and they multiplied greatly. The Egyptians became fearful of the potential power of so many Hebrews. Pharaoh, therefore, commanded the Hebrew midwives (named Shiphrah and Puah) to kill all male babies delivered to the Hebrew women. The midwives, however, "feared God" and disobeyed Pharaoh by allowing the male babies to live. When Pharaoh asked the midwives why they had disobeyed his orders, the midwives told him the Hebrew women had easier labors than Egyptian women and delivered their babies before the midwife arrived. "And God dealt well with the midwives" (Exodus, Chap. 1, verse 20).
In ancient Egypt, midwifery was a recognized female occupation, as attested by the Ebers Papyrus which dates from 1900 to 1550 BCE. Five columns of this papyrus deal with obstetrics and gynecology, especially concerning the acceleration of parturition and the birth prognosis of the newborn. The West car papyrus, dated to 1700 BCE, includes instructions for calculating the expected date of confinement and describes different styles of birth chairs. Bas reliefs in the royal birth rooms at Luxor and other temples also attest to the heavy presence of midwifery in this culture.[10]
Midwifery in Greco-Roman antiquity covered a wide range of women, including old women who continued folk medical traditions in the villages of the Roman Empire, trained midwives who garnered their knowledge from a variety of sources, and highly trained women who were considered female physicians.[11] However, there were certain characteristics desired in a “good” midwife, as described by the physician Soranus of Ephesus in the 2nd century. He states in his work, Gynecology, that “a suitable person will be literate, with her wits about her, possessed of a good memory, loving work, respectable and generally not unduly handicapped as regards her senses [i.e., sight, smell, hearing], sound of limb, robust, and, according to some people, endowed with long slim fingers and short nails at her fingertips.” Soranus also recommends that the midwife be of sympathetic disposition (although she need not have borne a child herself) and that she keep her hands soft for the comfort of both mother and child.[12] Pliny, another physician from this time, valued nobility and a quiet and inconspicuous disposition in a midwife.[13] A woman who possessed this combination of physique, virtue, skill, and education must have been difficult to find in antiquity. Consequently, there appears to have been three “grades” of midwives present in ancient times. The first was technically proficient; the second may have read some of the texts on obstetrics and gynecology; but the third was highly trained and reasonably considered a medical specialist with a concentration in midwifery.[13]
Agnodice or Agnodike (Gr. Ἀγνοδίκη) was the earliest historical, and likely apocryphal,[14] midwife mentioned among the ancient Greeks.[15]
Midwives were known by many different titles in antiquity, ranging from iatrinē (Gr. nurse), maia (Gr., midwife), obstetrix (Lat., obstetrician), and medica (Lat., doctor).[16] It appears as though midwifery was treated differently in the Eastern end of the Mediterranean basin as opposed to the West. In the East, some women advanced beyond the profession of midwife (maia) to that of gynaecologist (iatros gynaikeios, translated as women's doctor), for which formal training was required. Also, there were some gynecological tracts circulating in the medical and educated circles of the East that were written by women with Greek names, although these women were few in number. Based on these facts, it would appear that midwifery in the East was a respectable profession in which respectable women could earn their livelihoods and enough esteem to publish works read and cited by male physicians. In fact, a number of Roman legal provisions strongly suggest that midwives enjoyed status and remuneration comparable to that of male doctors.[12] One example of such a midwife is Salpe of Lemnos, who wrote on women’s diseases and was mentioned several times in the works of Pliny.[13]
However, in the Roman West, our knowledge of practicing midwives comes mainly from funerary epitaphs. Two hypotheses are suggested by looking at a small sample of these epitaphs. The first is the midwifery was not a profession to which freeborn women of families that had enjoyed free status of several generations were attracted; therefore it seems that most midwives were of servile origin. Second, since most of these funeral epitaphs describe the women as freed, it can be proposed that midwives were generally valued enough, and earned enough income, to be able to gain their freedom. It is not known from these epitaphs how certain slave women were selected for training as midwives. Slave girls may have been apprenticed, and it is most likely that mothers taught their daughters.[12]
The actual duties of the midwife in antiquity consisted mainly of assisting in the birthing process, although they may also have helped with other medical problems relating to women when needed. Often, the midwife would call for the assistance of a physician when a more difficult birth was anticipated. In many cases the midwife brought along two or three assistants.[17] In antiquity, it was believed by both midwives and physicians that a normal delivery was made easier when a woman sat upright. Therefore, during parturition, midwives brought a stool to the home where the delivery was to take place. In the seat of the birthstool was a crescent-shaped hole through which the baby would be delivered. The birthstool or chair often had armrests for the mother to grasp during the delivery. Most birthstools or chairs had backs which the patient could press against, but Soranus suggests that in some cases the chairs were backless and an assistant would stand behind the mother to support her.[12] The midwife sat facing the mother, encouraging and supporting her through the birth, perhaps offering instruction on breathing and pushing, sometimes massaging her vaginal opening, and supporting her perineum during the delivery of the baby. The assistants may have helped by pushing downwards on the top of the mother's abdomen.
Finally, the midwife received the infant, placed it in pieces of cloth, cut the umbilical cord, and cleansed the baby.[13] The child was sprinkled with “fine and powdery salt, or natron or aphronitre” to soak up the birth residue, rinsed, and then powdered and rinsed again. Next, the midwives cleared away any and all mucus present from the nose, mouth, ears, or anus. Midwives were encouraged by Soranus to put olive oil in the baby’s eyes to cleanse away any birth residue, and to place a piece of wool soaked in olive oil over the umbilical cord. After the delivery, the midwife made the initial call on whether or not an infant was healthy and fit to rear. She inspected the newborn for congenital deformities and testing its cry to hear whether or not it was robust and hearty. Ultimately, midwives made a determination about the chances for an infant’s survival and likely recommended that a newborn with any severe deformities be exposed.[12]
A 2nd-century terracotta relief from the Ostian tomb of Scribonia Attice, wife of physician-surgeon M. Ulpius Amerimnus, details a childbirth scene. Scribonia was a midwife and the relief shows her in the midst of a delivery. A patient sits in the birth chair, gripping the handles and the midwife’s assistant stands behind her providing support. Scribonia sits on a low stool in front of the woman, modestly looking away while also assisting the delivery by dilating and massaging the vagina, as encouraged by Soranus.[13]
The services of a midwife were not inexpensive; this fact that suggests poorer women who could not afford the services of a professional midwife often had to make do with female relatives. Many wealthier families had their own midwives. However, the vast majority of women in the Greco-Roman world very likely received their maternity care from hired midwives. They may have been highly trained or possessed only a rudimentary knowledge of obstetrics. Also, many families had a choice of whether or not they wanted to employ a midwife who practiced the traditional folk medicine or the newer methods of professional parturition.[12] Like a lot of other factors in antiquity, quality gynecological care often depended heavily on the socioeconomic status of the patient.
site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwifery
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