Why We Need More Midwives Now

Why We Need More Midwives Now
| by Peggy O’Mara, Editor and Publisher

In 1973 I was living in southern New Mexico, pregnant with my first child and looking for a midwife. I didn’t know how to find one, so I went to a local obstetrician for prenatal care, all the while still hoping to find a midwife.

A woman my husband worked with had been a midwife in England, and two of my friends, who lived 200 miles away, were planning to become midwives. I called the New Mexico Department of Health, only to find that the state no longer licensed midwives.

My friends and I all wanted to have homebirths, but there were no midwives where we lived. We were awestruck by 
The Birth Book, the first book to publish graphic, step-by-step photos of birth for the layman, and were reassured by the National Association of Parents and Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth (NAPSAC), an organization that held conferences on and published evidence about the safety of homebirth. Having a do-it-yourself mentality and trying to live lives of self-sufficiency, we naturally began to birth our babies ourselves.

Six months before our own first baby was born, my husband and I saw our friend Stephanie birth her son, Aram, at her home. We later helped to deliver the babies of three friends. I love birth, and was on my way to becoming a midwife, starting out, as had so many women before me, by helping a friend or neighbor. As Shafia Monroe, president of the International Center for Traditional Childbearing (ICTC), says, “Every woman 
is a potential midwife waiting to be born.”

As it turned out, while I loved helping the laboring mom, I was afraid of catching the baby. My husband always did that. Nor could I figure out how to be a midwife while being the mother of my own babies. In short, my life went in other directions.

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Mandy-Saint Louis Doula