What Is A Midwife ?

If you live in North America, you might not have thought of having a midwife as you primary care providers for you pregnancy and birth. Yes, many women in the US aren't familiar with midwives and in your mind, the word 'midwifery' may conjure as an extinct archaic practice.

Not so ...

These past twenty years there has been a growing interest in this ancient practice and it starts to get accepted as part of woman health care system like it has been centuries ago. It's only on the beginning of the 20th century up to 1960-s that this practice went so low in the US it nearly went to extinction.

Here I would like to explain why you should consider to have a midwife as your primary care provider for your pregnancy and birth.

Midwives are health care professionals specializing in assisting normal birth. Like obstetricians, they provide prenatal check-up, attends labor and birth, and provides care of women and babies after birth. However, midwives have a strikingly different birth philosophy and approaches to birth from obstetricians.

To begin with, the midwives model of care is based on the fact that pregnancy and birth are normal events, which is a quite different view from physicians who view births as medical events. So, instead of focusing what's wrong or what could be wrong, midwives focus on the fact that women are perfectly capable of giving birth and capitalizes on that.

Their job is to ensure their client's physical, psychological and social well-being as well as providing the mother with education, prenatal care, counseling and labor/birth support so that the mother can do her job (giving birth) successfully.

It is not surprising that midwives go an extra mile in terms of their services compared those offered by obstetricians by "literally" provide continuous support to women during pregnancy, labor and birth.

In short, the difference in attitude between midwives and obstetricians can be summed up as follows: midwives will treat women as normal until she 'proves' that she's not capable of giving birth, whereas obstetricians will treat women as potentially problematic until she 'proves' that she's capable of giving birth.

The application of midwifery model which gives holistic care and support to pregnant women, coupled with an effort to minimize technological intervention has been proven to :

• reduce the incidence of birth injury, trauma and c-section
• decrease maternal and infant mortality
• lower medical cost
• increase satisfaction with birth experience
• higher birth weights
• lower rates of prematurity.

Indeed, developed countries which employ the application of this model for childbirth, such as the Netherlands obtain the highest scores of low maternal and infant mortality. In contrast, the US, despite of the advance of technology, scores much less compared to the developed countries which has a midwifery model at the heart of their childbirth care system.

Therefore, I really encourage you to explore the midwifery model for your pregnancy care since in my opinion, it's the most promising health care model for low risk pregnant women.

If you want to know more about this subject, browse these following articles:

• Midwife services - what does a midwife offer ?
• Finding and choosing a midwife
• Midwife fee
• In what birth setting you can use a midwife ?
• Type of midwife, part I : certified nurse midwife
• Type of midwife, part II : direct entry midwife

Other articles which may interest you:

• Why choose to have a natural birth ?
• Why homebirth ?
• Giving birth at hospital
• Giving birth at a birthing center

From Midwife page to Homepage