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.  

The Big Push for Midwives collaborated with the California Families for Access to Midwives (CFAM) to get out this latest news release in California. CFAM is a social justice organization dedicated to removing barriers that deny California citizens access to licensed midwife care.

It looks like the "Free Our Midwives!" rally on July 1 at the Capitol in Sacramento, CA, was a great success, with 375 parents, babies, and midwife supporters converging on the Capitol in support of efforts to remove from California law a repressive and outdated provision that is threatening the future of legal midwifery in California, and perpetuating racial and economic disparities in birth outcomes.

Assemblywoman Susan A. Bonilla told the crowd at the rally that "You have made an impact here today." In addition, Assemblywoman Bonilla did two important things to help remove physician supervision:

1. She removed language from the bill (AB1308) that restated and outlined a plan for implementing California’s famously ill-conceived and unobtainable requirement of physician supervision of licensed midwives.
2. She also verbally committed to amending the existing law to take physician supervision completely off the books. PLEASE THANK HER (using old fashioned pen and paper! No calls for now!) for her support.

Resulting PushHeadlines:

• The Modesto Bee  |  July 8, 2013
• The Sacramento Bee (photo gallery)  |  July 8, 2013
• Point Reyes Light  | July 3, 2013
• LAFamily.com  |  June 2013

Congratulations from the Big Push for Midwives Campaign to the Friends of Missouri Midwives (FOMM) and the Missouri Midwives Association (MMA) on the fifth anniversary of the Missouri Supreme Court decision!

The Big Push for Midwives steering committee particularly LOVES this latest FOMM news release as our own Susan Jenkins was one of the attorneys who wrote the birth activists' amicus brief back then and consulted with MMA leadership on the text of the bill.

Please enjoy the news release here, which is well-written, upbeat, and positive. Again, congratulations to Missouri!!

Resulting PushHeadlines:

• Missourinet  |  July 9, 2013

Fire up the PushMediaMachine, we are back in business! We live to Push again! Many thanks and lots of hugs and kisses to all of you incredibly wonderful Pushers and other folks who chipped in on this latest fundraising effort.

Because you reached down and gave what you could, the Big Push for Midwives campaign's "50+ Shades of Green for CPMs" fundraiser was a pretty solid success.

Although we did not quite reach our goal of $5,000 (and anyone who wants to tip us over the top is still happily encouraged to do so), we got SOOOO close that our media relaunch is a definite GO.

We are thrilled to report that we will now be able to sign up again with our media software vendor, pay our loyal social-media-maven intern his back wages, and be back to our old PushNewsRelease and PushAlert tricks again real soon.

Don't forget to visit the Newsroom and get signed up for PushAlerts!

If you have any favorite reporters, bloggers, media outlets who you want to make sure are on our lists, please pass their contact info on to [email protected].

The Big Push for Midwives campaign belongs to you.

• It isn't the website alone (although we do have a lovely website).
• It isn't the Facebook page alone (though we're delighted to have so many fans!)
• And it certainly isn't just the steering committee.

We are here to help you in the PushStates out and to keep the Big Push for Midwives campaign going, but we are not a top-down organization, rather, we are the essence of grassroots. The Big Push campaign has always been the work of a coalition of the PushState groups, and our focus has always been to create a mutual-help project for all the consumers and midwives pushing in the statehouses and sharing ideas, strategies, successes, and setbacks to create efficiencies and interconnectivity.

For this coalition to be be sustainable, we realize that it will be necessary for periodic fundraisers. Please think of these as chipping in to keep your coalition going. A natural question is what other sources of funding might be available to us?

Our applications for grants have not been successful for the most part. Grant-makers don't seem to get it that, without licensing CPMs, nothing else really matters much—Medicaid, education, federal "recognition," schmoozing with midwives from the rest of the world, really none of it.

So long as nearly half of the women in the US lack access to Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) just because they live in the wrong state, License First has to be the policy priority. We won't stop sharing this message.

So, again, THANKS SO MUCH to all of you and to everyone else who helped us turn 50+ shades of green into some much-needed green dollars.

Have you ever stopped to think about how one group's version of what is true and what isn't becomes the dominant voice? All through history, one group or another has decided that it had the insider information not only about God but about life, the world, how things were supposed to work. If you weren't part of the in-group, if you doubted their worldview, their claims to orthodoxy, you were a heretic and life could get pretty unpleasant if the orthodox view had the support of the government. So, pagans against early Christians, Christians against pagans, Christianity against Islam, Islam against Christianity, Catholics against Protestants -- and that's just Europe and colonial America. Almost every religion was oppressed somewhere at some time and, if it became dominant, has done some oppressing itself.

A state-forced orthodox worldview can lead a lot of people to embrace a belief which, empirically, turns out to be false. But those "heretics" who saw the flaws in the worldview, those who are the ones who said "you know, by my scientific calculations, the earth is probably round,"  and, in addition, "it revolves around the sun." They got into a lot of trouble when the state- or religion-enforced world view saw a flat earth that was the center of the universe.

When finding ways to make sure that Consumers can access the provider of their choice so that they can have a safe birth in the location of their choice, you inevitably run into the dominant worldview of the American Medical Association (AMA). To wit, in 1914, a man named Abraham Flexner told the AMA to get in one room, agree on what teaching was right, and then lobby the State and Federal governments to enforce this with their power. He didn't use the word "orthodoxy," but it just means "right teaching." All of the AMA's justification for dominance comes from the idea that they are "orthodox," and the best plan is to have the state force their ideas on us "heretics."

We now mock some of the pre-enlightenment ideas of the Church, such as the "flat earth" theory, but we aren't really any better. We still let orthodoxy dictate healthcare decisions instead of the evidence. For example, physicians knew for 20 years that they should not x-ray pregnant women, but it was "standard of care" i.e. "orthodoxy." So they kept on doing it until forced to stop.

Our challenge is very simple but very difficult: No matter what we say or can prove, "they" are going to state an unwavering belief in a flat earth. "There be monsters over there!" "You are going to sail off the end of the world!" Our task is to get us the freedom to risk sailing that way anyway on the chance that we might discover a new world instead.

Fortunately, we've already done the math. The world is, indeed, round.

Special thanks to Keith Williston of Missouri for inspiring this PushBlog post. At the heart of Keith's work in the PushStates, in Missouri and beyond, is his family-owned freestanding birth center, A Mother's Love Birth Center. Keith and his wife Rachel Williston, CNM, CPM, encourage more people to become involved in the work of the PushStates.

Here at the Big Push for Midwives, we highlight the fundamental importance of state licensing laws. While we all share in the excitement of the news that CPMs and the CPM credential are making headway in the U.S. Congress and in the halls of government in Washington, D.C., the excitement is more than a little tempered by the reality that unless and until CPMs are licensed in a particular state, no federal legislation will take effect in that state.

To wit, as birth centers are learning, state Medicaid plans will NOT cover freestanding birth center services unless the birth center holds a state license, and state Medicaid plans will NOT cover professional services of midwives in birth centers unless the midwives are licensed.

The same will inevitably be true with education loan repayment programs and other federal initiatives. The National Health Service Corps is simply not going to place a CPM in a maternity care shortage area of a state where CPMs are not licensed, and CPMs who are not licensed by their state cannot be eligible for Medicaid reimbursement.

Likewise, in January 2014, when the provider non-discrimination provision of the health care reform law went into effect — it is requiring all health insurance companies and managed care plans to include all categories of state-licensed health professionals in their networks — CPMs will NOT qualify for inclusion with other health professionals unless they are licensed.

Under the U.S. Constitution, only state legislatures—not the federal government—can license health care providers. The Constitution reserves this power strictly to the states. Ultimately, it is state licensure that will ensure that all women have access to CPMs, making them easier to find by legally qualifying them to practice under state agency standards, and making them more affordable by covering their services under private insurance and Medicaid.

So, now is the time for us to re-double our "in-state" efforts. Walking the halls in state legislatures is the most important thing that can be done — right now — to advance midwifery in the United States.

Here at the Big Push for Midwives Campaign nerve center, we are inspired by all of the incredible efforts performed daily by the hard-working, dedicated, unsung, and amazing PushState advocates. What each of you are doing for mothers and babies (and their babies and their babies) every day, against nearly insurmountable odds, in so many states across this great country. But it is important to note: we see you, we honor you for all that you are doing, and we are here from sea to shining sea to support you in any and every way that we can.