We had our first baby on a mat on the floor of a
hospital room with a veteran midwife who was a nurse with a master’s degree to boot. Yet the “traditional” hospital staff could not stand the thought of it. Across Idaho, there are dozens of midwives delivering hundreds of babies a year. Some of them have professional training. Some have lay training or apprenticeship experience. For the second year now, they are asking the Legislature to offer a state license for their profession. The midwives give a few reasons for the request: They want to be able to carry some key drugs to births, to submit insurance claims, to make childbirth in Idaho safer and give prospective parents more choices/
Nathaniel Hoffman
, PaleoMedia.org.
More here
DFO:
I want to introduce you to a solid new Web site that covers Idaho politics and the Legislature — Nathaniel Hoffman’s PaleoMedia.org here. Nathaniel wrote the midwifery column for Boise Weekly. You can check out other recent work by him
here
and
here
.
Question: What do you think of midwifery?