In commemoration of Labor Day 2013, The Big Push for Midwives Campaign has launched the Honor Your Midwife for Labor Day fundraising project, which will give thousands of families across the United States the opportunity to honor their midwife and support our media campaign to raise public awareness about the benefits of midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care.

Your tax-deductible donations will go directly to reserving a space on the Honor Your Midwife for Labor Day wall on The Big Push for Midwives Campaign website, where you can express your appreciation and gratitude for your midwife.

In addition to honoring the midwives working to preserve birth options for families seeking an alternative to hospital birth, Honor Your Midwife for Labor Day will fund the technological and professional resources needed to support The Big Push for Midwives Public Relations and Social Media team. We are the only national organization providing professionally developed, proactive and pro-midwife Public Relations and Media Relations services, including customized media lists, to states with active grassroots campaigns in support of expanding access to midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care.

The Big Push for Midwives Campaign's professional communications team has a proven track record of honoring the midwifery profession by placing positive stories about the many benefits associated with midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care in local, state, national, and international media outlets.

The sad truth is that midwives rarely get the honor they deserve for providing families with the full range of birth options, improving birth outcomes, and saving millions of dollars in health care costs each year. The Honor Your Midwife for Labor Day gives people the opportunity to both honor their midwife at the personal level and support the campaign to honor the profession of midwifery itself at a much broader level, through the media, and slowly change the many negative cultural attitudes about birth.

Please donate and help spread the word to raise public awareness of the personal, social, and economic benefits associated with midwives and out-of-hospital maternity care and fight back against anti-midwife, anti-home birth propaganda that continues to find its way into the media.

At its November 2005 Interim Meeting, the American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates adopted Resolution 814 titled, “Limited Licensure Health Care Provider Training and Certification Standards.” The resolution states:

RESOLVED, That our AMA, through the Scope of Practice Partnership, immediately embark on a campaign to identify and have elected or appointed to state medical boards physicians (MDs or DOs) who are committed to asserting and exercising their full authority to regulate the practice of medicine by all persons within a state notwithstanding efforts by boards of nursing or other entities that seek to unilaterally redefine their scope of practice into areas that are true medical practice. (Directive to Take Action)

Resolution 814 emerged from the Scope of Practice Partnership (SOPP), which was formed by the leadership of the AMA and other physician trade organizations to obstruct expansion and to restrict the licensed scope of practice of other healthcare professionals. These actions by organized medicine limit access to providers who have the education, expertise and experience to offer safe, quality health care services to the public, particularly for rural, uninsured and other underserved populations.

The Big Push for Midwives Campaign objects to the misleading and divisive language used in the AMA SOPP resolution, which needlessly pits medical doctors against other healthcare professionals at a time when the American public is faced with unprecedented healthcare shortages and millions of uninsured children and adults. The healthcare professionals that have been targeted by SOPP, which include nurse practitioners, physician assistants, podiatrists, optometrists, psychologists, chiropractors, and midwives, are the solution to this crisis, not the problem. The erroneous claim that SOPP can or should determine what is best for the patients of other healthcare professionals represents an outdated and patronizing line of thinking that cannot possibly serve the needs of today's patients—particularly childbearing women and their babies. Therefore, The Big Push for Midwives opposes SOPP and its efforts to restrict the scope of practice of our allied healthcare partners and to obstruct legislative initiatives that would increase access to licensed Certified Professional Midwives.

Father Knows Best Meets Big Brother Is Watching:

"The SOPP also is overseeing the completion of the AMA Scope of Practice Data Series, a compendium of information and resources for medical associations on 10 non-physician providers, and the creation of a geographic mapping tool that will allow Federation partners the ability to map, on a state-by-state basis and by specialty, the practice location of not only allopathic and osteopathic physicians but also various non-physician providers."

"From the President" by Ronald M. Davis, MD http://elephantcircle.net/?p=429

Following this AMA directive, several state medical boards have targeted more than a dozen midwives in states where CPM licensure is not yet available, leaving hundreds of pregnant women without care.