02/15/2024
ICYMI, there are 38 states now where Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) are legally authorized to practice and provide out-of-hospital birth options and community birth to families.
Today on Valentine's Day, we feel the 💜 here at The Big Push for Midwives Campaign! It all began on the Birth Policy Yahoo Group, which was established in 2004 by Katherine Margaret Hemple, a birth activist who was one of the leaders of the successful efforts to achieve Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) licensure in Wisconsin in 2006, and a pivotal leader in the larger movement.
The conversations on the Birth Policy Yahoo Group frequently turned to advocacy issues, as the group’s participants include many activists—both consumers and midwives—who are committed to promoting the availability of direct-entry midwives.
In late September through early October 2007, Birth Policy Yahoo Group participants began to notice and post about an increasing number of prosecutions and investigations of midwives in several geographically contiguous states.
On October 9, 2007, a new thread began called "Dark Cloud Over the Midwest."
Over the course of about 36 hours, an avalanche of posts, information, and ideas were shared on a clearly growing trend of arrests and investigations of midwives in states that lacked a licensure mechanism for legal status, from Missouri to Pennsylvania, including prosecutions in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Iowa, and spreading west to Wyoming.
Information also was shared about American Medical Association House of Delegates’ Resolution 902 from November 2005, which called on state medical boards to begin aggressively pursuing “midlevel providers,” licensed or otherwise, whose actions constitute the practice of medicine.
The AMA founded SOPP at that meeting, effectuating its plan and to lobby against laws that would license unlicensed health professionals or expand the scope of practice of already-licensed non-MD practitioners. See recent "wins" by SOPP: https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/scope-practice/ama-successfully-fights-scope-practice-expansions-threaten
Birth Policy members further noticed that, while the prosecutions seemed to be spreading from one state to its close neighbors, the same "viral" phenomenon could be noted for interest in CPMs and the Midwives Model of Care, with increasingly more stories in conventional news media outlets, as well as on blogs and within other social networking groups.
Within a few days of the start of this online discussion in fall 2007, group members developed a desire for an in-person meeting, so that those in the states most affected by prosecutions could work together—sharing information and ideas on what works and what doesn't, lending expertise and experience, and quickly developing advocacy strategy, testimony, handouts, and other strategy tips.
As word spread, more and more participants signaled their intention to join us, including leaders of North American Registry of Midwives (NARM), National Association of Certified Professional Midwives (NACPM), Midwives Alliance of North America, Citizens for Midwifery, and The National Association to Advance Black Birth- NAABB (fka ICTC), as well as members of various state midwifery and friends of midwifery groups, many of whom had revised their plans at the last minute in order to attend.
A small subset of the PushSummit 2007 group organized and planned a meeting for a small group of midwives and activists from the hardest hit states to get together in Chicago a few weeks later in early 2008 (on what was to become PushDay) to do intensive in-person planning and coordination and launch The Big Push for Midwives Campaign. ...
