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Update on our legislation

Our bill is scheduled to be heard on Feb 18th!!!!

The Indiana Midwifery Taskforce was founded December 21,1993 with the sole purpose of legalizing midwives in Indiana, and for the past 13 years we have been working on a midwifery licensure bill.  After all of those years, and an incalculable amount of work, we have been told that our bill will be heard in the Senate Health Committee on February 18!  We have never been able to get a hearing in the Senate until now.  Our lobbyist, Kathy has been working overtime to get this for us.

We have been asked NOT to pack the hearing with moms and babies.  A few handpicked people will be testifying.  We know that many other bills will be heard that day, and our time will be very limited.  We also know that because of the economic crunch, there is no funding for new licensure boards and it will be very difficult to get a licensure bill through this year. It is also possible that at the last minute, it won’t be heard, because such is the nature of hearings, legislation and politics at the Statehouse.

There will be other hearings, and other opportunities when it will be vital for you to participate at the Statehouse as our bill moves through the legislature. Stay tuned because we need you! We will be keeping you informed, so expect lots of emails for the next month or so.  We are still in the preliminary stages.

What you can do —

Pray! 

Send money to IMT to help pay for the lobbyist.

Write letters to your senator and representative asking them to vote YES on SB 508, the midwifery licensure bill.

Help us find nurses and doctors who will write to the Senate Health Committee Members in favor of CPMS and our bill.  (This needs to be done ASAP)

 We could never have gotten this far without your amazing support! Thank you all for what you do for midwifery in Indiana!

 Indiana Midwifery Taskforce

Hoosier Push for Midwives begins (again)

It’s that time again!

We are gearing up for our legislative session! We will be filing a licensure bill again this year, and we will not be successful without your help.  We will be contacting you all in the next few weeks and we will be asking you to make phone calls, write letters, and speak to legislators about our bill. As you know, midwives in Indiana, and other (mostly) midwestern states face felony charges for practicing medicine and practicing midwifery without a license.  Midwives can be fined, and can go to prison for serving Indiana families.  Our licensure bill would remove the “practicing medicine” charge, and also legalize the practice of midwifery.  We started researching midwifery licensure bills in 1993, and have worked since then trying to get our bill passed.

This year we hired a lobbyist who knows the ins and outs of life at the Statehouse.  She greatly improves our chances of getting our bill passed.  However we still need all of you, and all of your efforts.  We also need you to help us pay for our lobbyist.  The midwives have done several fundraisers, and we have donated our own money, but we still owe $15,000 and we need your help.  We know that times are tough, and no one has much money to spare.  But if every Indiana homebirth family would donate $10 to our cause, we could pay our lobbyist.  Please help us get our bill passed this year!  Please make it possible for the midwives in Indiana to continue to serve you.  We want to be there when you need us — we want to be able to answer our phones without fear.  You can send checks to Indiana Midwifery Taskforce, PO Box 6145, Bloomington, In 47407 or you can give through PayPal by going to http://www.indianamidwiferytaskforce.org/

We thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

Please consider a donation if you support Indiana midwives and homebirthing families!  I plan to send along a $20 donation: one for each of my amazing midwife-attended homebirths.  I know money is tight for many of us, but it is an important cause.  🙂

Vote here- and it’s not political! :)

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Pregnancy and breastfeeding correlates to reduced breast cancer risk

As early as 1700, Bernardino Ramazzini, the Italian founder of occupational medicine, recognised that there was one female occupation whose members were far more likely to die from breast cancer than any other – nuns.

Evidence for the protective effect of having children and breastfeeding has accumulated in the years since.

There have been debates over which of these factors is more important, but the size of the Million Women study, led by Valerie Beral from the clinical epidemiology unit at Oxford University, has made its results fairly conclusive. Beral yesterday challenged the medical industry to turn its attention to preventing the disease.

The Million Women study found having a first baby at a young age is protective, as is late onset of puberty and early menopause. Taller and heavier women are at greater risk. But the biggest protective factors are the number of children and years of breastfeeding. A woman has a 7% decreased risk of breast cancer per birth and her risk drops by a further 4% for every year of breastfeeding.

Read more of this article here.

Women are strong

That quote I see frequently… “We have a secret in our culture… and it’s not that birth is painful.  It’s that women are strong.” (Laura Stavoe Harm).

Well, it’s TRUE!

I was honored to witness a mom VBAC last week.  The words that come to mind are Amazing, Beautiful, and Magnificient.  I choose to see the beauty of a woman find her strength instead of focusing on the things that did not go according to plan.  While it was not the HBAC that was planned, but it was a VBAC- and it was Victorious.

Welcome to our world, little one… and congrats momma.  You did it, despite all odds.

Midwife On A Mission

Beating the Odds
An 81 year-old grandmother runs one of the most successful birthing clinics in the nation in the city with the worst infant mortality rate.  Wyatt Andrews reports.

I particularly loved this:

“Do you think it boils down to just the time you spend with them,” Andrews asked Lubic.
“I think so,” she replied. “I’m convinced that’s what it is. It’s time, respect, its treating people with dignity.”

Inspiring!  Kudos to Ruth and the midwives at the center!

Expanding the Birthing Rights Conversation through Legal Scholarship

This definitely seems worthy of passing along!  Please do forward this information for the benefit of birthing mothers everywhere.

I am pleased to present the first-ever NAPW law student writing contests to expand the birthing rights conversation. Attached, you will find a more detailed description of the contests and how you or your organization can become a co-sponsor, and a file containing both writing prompts.

The first contest asks for a critical analysis of the absence of birthing rights issues from gender discrimination and feminist jurisprudence textbooks and curricula (in fact, none of the top three casebooks used in law school courses dedicated to gender and the law address the issue of childbirth or midwifery).

The second contest asks students to develop legal theories that can be used to challenge policies banning pregnant women from having a vaginal birth after a prior caesarean section (VBAC). This topic will encourage students to address a growing problem that has received very little attention from the feminist legal community both in academia and within the leading women’s rights legal advocacy organizations.

Please feel free to pass the writing prompts on to any law students (or law schools/journals) that you may know. There will be cash prizes  for the top three entries in each contest ($1000, $500, and $250; we hope to adjust these figures higher, pending funding!). Submission guidelines and other information will be available at www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org. Further questions can be directed to writingcontest@advocatesforpregnantwomen.org. If you have questions about co-sponsorship, you can call me at 718-316-8922.

I hope that you will be as excited as I am, and will forward this email far and wide. I also hope that you will become a co-sponsor of this effort, which promises to yield some truly cutting-edge legal scholarship in an area that has been somewhat overlooked by the feminist legal academy.

Yours Sincerely,
Farah Diaz-Tello
Legal Intern
National Advocates for Pregnant Women

At Your Cervix

Have you heard about the At Your Cervix documentary? I think it sounds really interesting and would love to see it when it’s finished. The documentary has made it to the finals at IdeaBlob.com– please go and vote for it if you are interested in this subject! They will use the prize money for post-production costs.

I’m sure all of us women would perfer that pelvix exams be comfortable and empowering! 🙂

The documentary At Your Cervix explores the connection between the way medical and nursing students are taught pelvic exams and the reality that most women experience them as painful and disempowering.

At Your Cervix breaks the silence around the unethical methods used by medical and nursing schools to teach students how to perform pelvic exams; the most egregious being on unconsenting, anaesthetized women. At the same time, the film highlights the Gynecological Teaching Associate (GTA) Program in New York City. Fuelled by the spirit of women’s health activism, the GTA program began over 30 years ago and it has been shown to be the most effective way to teach exams and is also the most ethical and empowering to women.

This process

It’s interesting… how “real life” impedes on indirect knowledge. If you read online long enough, (some) natural birth advocates may (seem to) say that all interventions are bad. I myself used to lean that way. And yet now, I am sometime seeing it is those interventions that we eschew that can allow a woman to avoid interventions that are even more ‘meddlesome’.

I’m not sure I am done ruminating on this, or even saying it all that well… but I have seen some interventions help rather than hinder a mom. And in those cases, I am reminded that moderation is key.

Some interventions do have their place. But ideal outcome must be balanced with perceptive care and recognition that there is both a baby and a mother affected by the care, or lack thereof that is given.

And this is way off-topic, but man… the elliptical machine at the gym is kicking my butt. Literally. 😉