Freedom and the Seed has been about change in 2013. The FATS Blog is the next fresh change we are excited to make! We want to share with the world all the interesting things happening in our office with our mamas, families, and life in general. So if you are checking in here I guess you are curious about this crazy world we live in called Freedom and the Seed.
Read through the birth stories and articles. Gaze thoughtfully over the birth and body art. Tear up watching the videos. Enjoy making the yummy recipes with your family and friends and make sure to laugh along the way. As you explore, may you be filled with positive and encouraging thoughts about women, families, home, bodies, birth, babies, and really, just life.
Much love ~ Wendi
yay! i will be a fan, i love my midwives!
I think the author of this post was trnyig to be diplomatic in saying that all homebirth midwives should have higher standards and carry malpractice insurance. I don’t have to be diplomatic I’ll straight up tell you what this means. The CPM credential (it is not a degree it’s not conferred by any accredited university or college) and all other lay midwifery designations are not worth the paper they’re printed on. The ONLY midwives in the U.S. who deserve to be called a midwife and take on the blessed and life-and-death responsibility of attending mothers during birth are Certified Nurse Midwives. There are reasons that CPMs are either uninsurable or flat-out illegal the lack of education and standards makes you DANGEROUS. Sorry to be a buzzkill, but that is the truth. If you care about being the BEST you can be for mamas and babies (who are really the most important people here) you should get the BEST education you possibly can and earn a respectable degree and title which lets you work at home or in the hospital, anywhere in the world, and which qualifies you to carry malpractice insurance to protect the families you serve. The arrogance of the CPMs, other lay midwives, and their supporters is mind-boggling. Why, when there is a perfectly legitimate way to become a midwife, would you settle for less? Why are you selling families short? Why are you promoting something which is sub-standard everywhere in the world? Why do you insist on continuing to pursue what is considered for good reason CRIMINAL in a number of states, and murky and alegal at best in others? Why continue to dupe unsuspecting women into thinking that all midwives are created equal, and that the lay midwifery alternative education is sufficient? You are lying to yourselves, and most importantly, you are lying to mothers and families by misrepresenting yourselves as qualified, educated, safe practitioners. Shame on you and ALL lay midwives who do not see that their selfishness and unwillingness to reach for the very highest standards endangers families. There is no excuse. NONE. Not when there are avenues to become a Certified Nurse Midwife.
I wanted to coenmmt on your clarifications since some of them look like they are about as clear as mud. I completely agree with the first one. Education is of utmost importance in midwifery. The more we know, the better we can serve and support our community. I also think the NARM qualifications are laughably inappropriate for stamping new midwives as fit to practice alone. Your second stance on malpractice insurance leads me to believe you have never looked into this issue. It is a legal requirement in my state (CA) to carry malpractice insurance yet no insurance company will give it to us. It is not possible. They feel the risks are too high and they simply will not cover us. The State of CA knows this so they have come up with a form that we have to have our families sign that states we do not carry malpractice insurance and this is considered informed consent and makes our practice legal; even without malpractice insurance. CA is not the only state with this issue either.As far as mandatory reporting hospitals don’t even have mandatory reporting. They certainly have WAAAAAAY more adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes than home birth midwives; even after you take out of the high risk pregnancies and only compare apples to apples. Accountability would be awesome and eye opening but I bet you would be mortified at just how dangerous hospitals are when/if this happens vs. home birth. Also, I am not sure how an unintentional home birth would be classified as such or not qualify in one’s stats for a planned home birth . This doesn’t make any sense. Real evidence based maternity care is ever evolving AND subject to the knowledge and information one agrees with right? Who/What is the overlying authority you agree with on these matters? ACOG? They don’t even follow their own guidelines. This is the inherent problem with evidence based maternity care. Who is giving the evidence? Who gets to say what the guidelines are? For example: inductions. When is a good time for an induction? How do you know? What does the evidence say? How often does this happen with adverse outcomes before the evidence changes? Sometimes common sense and treating people like individuals and not protocols is more important than what the evidence states. I am not discounting science at all. In fact, I read journal articles often and base a lot of my knowledge on them. However, not every body functions the same way and we need to account for that variable being human. And this goes both ways, care providers make mistakes. Whether they are licensed or not, whether they are OB’s or Midwives or whatever. We are all human doing the best we can do for the betterment of all most of us anyway! On your last point, I could not agree more. Except from reading your recent entries, it seems you are using misguided and/or incorrect information to base your opinions and then judging people for their actions or their choices without ever having gone to the original source for their input this is called gossip. I realize you are using their own words from posts they have made but again, without ever having gone to the person who wrote them for clarification you might be misunderstanding the scenario. I believe this is a violation of your attempt to promote understanding here.