Midwifery is the health science and health profession that deals with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period, in addition to the sexual and reproductive health of women throughout their lives. In many countries, midwifery is a medical profession. A professional in midwifery is known as a midwife.
A home birth is a birth that takes place in a residence rather than in a hospital or a birthing center. They may be attended by a midwife, or lay attendant with experience in managing home births. Home birth was, until the advent of modern medicine, the de facto method of delivery. The term was coined in the middle of the 19th century as births began to take place in hospitals.
Ina May Gaskin is an American midwife who has been described as "the mother of authentic midwifery." She helped found the self-sustaining community, The Farm, with her husband Stephen Gaskin in 1971 where she markedly launched her career in midwifery. She is known for the Gaskin Maneuver, has written several books on midwifery and childbirth, and continues to educate society through lectures and conferences and spread her message of natural, old-age inspired, fearless childbirth.
The Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) provides healthcare services to rural, underserved populations since 1925, and educates nurse-midwives since 1939.
Mary Carson Breckinridge was an American nurse midwife and the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), which provided comprehensive family medical care to the mountain people of rural Kentucky. FNS served remote and impoverished areas off the road and rail system but accessible by horseback. She modeled her services on European practices and sought to professionalize American nurse-midwives to practice autonomously in homes and decentralized clinics. Although Breckinridge's work demonstrated efficacy by dramatically reducing infant and maternal mortality in Appalachia, at a comparatively low cost, her model of nurse-midwifery never took root in the United States.
Midwifery is a women's profession that assists women from pregnancy to newborn care. In some traditional Maya communities, a goddess of midwifery is invoked, and midwives are generally believed to be assigned their profession through signs and visions. In pre-Spanish Yucatan, the aged midwife goddess was called Ixchel.
Ruth Watson Lubic, CNM, EdD, FAAN, FACNM, is an American nurse-midwife and applied anthropologist who pioneered the role of nurse-midwives as primary care providers for women, particularly in maternity care. Lubic is considered to be one of the leaders of the nurse-midwifery movement in the United States.
Ágnes Geréb is a Hungarian gynaecologist/midwife and psychologist and a convicted criminal. She is the pioneer of including paternal participation in deliveries of children at hospitals and in homebirths in Hungary. She founded the Napvilág birthing centre. Geréb has helped deliver 3,500 babies at home.
Childbirth in rural Appalachia has long been a subject of concern amongst the population because infant mortality rates are higher in Appalachia than in other parts of the United States. Additionally, poor health in utero, at birth, and in childhood can contribute to poor health throughout life. The region's low income, geographic isolation, and low levels of educational attainment reduce both access to and utilization of modern medical care. Traditional medical practices, including lay midwifery, persisted longer in Appalachia than in other U.S. regions.
Louise (Bourgeois) Boursier (1563–1636) was a French Royal Court midwife who delivered babies for many women in her twenty-six year professional career. Marie de Médicis, the wife of Henry the Great of France, was one of her patients, and Bourgeois delivered her six children. Bourgeois' income was about ten times the average midwife's. She believed she was blessed with practical midwifery talents from Phaenarete, the mother of Socrates.
Midwifery in the Middle Ages impacted women's work and health prior to the professionalization of medicine. During the Middle Ages in Western Europe, people relied on the medical knowledge of Roman and Greek philosophers, specifically Galen, Hippocrates, and Aristotle. These medical philosophers focused primarily on the health of men, and women's health issues were understudied. Thus, these philosophers did not focus on the baby and they encouraged women to handle women's issues. In fact, William L. Minkowski asserted that a male's reputation was negatively affected if he associated with or treated pregnant patients. Resultantly, male physicians did not engage with pregnant patients, and women had a place in medicine as midwives. Myriam Greilsammer notes that an additional opposition to men's involvement in childbearing was that men should not associate with female genitalia throughout the secret practices of childbearing. The prevalence of this mindset allowed women to continue the practice of midwifery throughout most of the Medieval era with little or no male influence on their affairs. Minkowski writes that in Guy de Chauliac's fourteenth-century work Chirurgia magna, "he wrote that he was unwilling to discourse on midwifery because the field was dominated by women." However, changing views of medicine caused the women's role as midwife to be pushed aside as the professionalization of medical practitioners began to go up.
Midwives in the United States assist childbearing women during pregnancy, labor and birth, and the postpartum period. Some midwives also provide primary care for women including well-woman exams, health promotion, and disease prevention, family planning options, and care for common gynecological concerns. Before the turn of the 20th century, traditional midwives were informally trained and helped deliver almost all births. Today, midwives are professionals who must undergo formal training. Midwives in the United States formed the Midwifery Education, Regulation, and Association task force to establish a framework for midwifery.
Mary Francis Hill Coley was an American lay midwife who ran a successful business providing a range of birth services and who starred in a critically acclaimed documentary film used to train midwives and doctors. Her competence projected an image of black midwives as the face of an internationally esteemed medical profession, while working within the context of deep social and economic inequality in health care provided to African Americans. Her life story and work exist in the context of Southern granny midwives who served birthing women outside of hospitals.
A direct-entry midwife is a midwife who has become credentialed without first becoming a nurse. There are direct-entry midwifery programs that prepare students to become Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) or Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs). Certified Professional Midwives are known for being "more natural and less intervention oriented." In other words, these midwives typically work outside of the hospital setting in homes and birth centers and do not employ methods for childbirth that physicians in hospitals commonly use such as caesarean section, forceps and other types of equipment and drugs.
A midwife is a health professional who cares for mothers and newborns around childbirth, a specialization known as midwifery.
Ronnie Sue Lichtman, is a midwife, educator, writer and advocate for women's health. She has published widely for both lay and professional audiences. The Chair of the Midwifery Education Program at The State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center in New York City, she earned a Ph.D. in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and her MS in Maternity Nursing with a specialization in midwifery from Columbia University School of Nursing. She previously directed the midwifery programs at Columbia University and Stony Brook University.
A nurse midwife is both a nurse and a midwife, having completed nursing and midwifery education leading to practice as a nurse midwife and sometimes credentialed in the specialty. Nurse midwives provide care of women across the lifespan, including during pregnancy and the postpartum period, and well woman care and birth control.
Victoria Joyce Ely was an American nurse who served in World War I in the Army Nurse Corps and then provided nursing services in the Florida Panhandle in affiliation with the American Red Cross. To address the high infant and maternal death rates in Florida in the 1920s, she lectured and worked at the state health office. Due to her work, training improved for birth attendants and death rates dropped. After 15 years in the state's service, she opened a rural health clinic in Ruskin, Florida, providing both basic nursing services and midwife care. The facility was renamed the Joyce Ely Health Center in her honor in 1954. In 1983, she was inducted into Florida Public Health Association's Hall of Memory and in 2002 was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame.
Margaret Charles Smith was an African-American midwife, who became known for her extraordinary skill over a long career, spanning over thirty years. Despite working primarily in rural areas with women who were often in poor health, she lost very few of the more than 3000 babies she delivered, and none of the mothers in childbirth. In 1949, she became one of the first official midwives in Green County, Alabama, and she was still practicing in 1976, when the state passed a law outlawing traditional midwifery. In the 1990s, she cowrote a book about her career, Listen to Me Good: The Life Story of an Alabama Midwife, and in 2010 she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.
Carolyn Conant Van Blarcom was an American nurse and midwife reformer. In 1913 she became the first American nurse to become a licensed midwife. She made pioneering contributions in preventing childhood blindness. Van Blarcom also played instrumental role in establishing a school for midwives, and extensively contributed in reforming some of the important health institutions in America including the Maryland State Sanatorium for Tuberculosis.
