This made me sad.... I thought we were kind of past this.
Anyhow, brief history: There are two schools of American midwifery. The first, led by the ACNM (American College of Nurse Midwives) produces nurse-midwives (CNMs), practices primarily in hospital (though some do homebirths), and focuses on a university-based education. The second, led MANA (Midwives Alliance of North America) and the NARM (North American Registry of Midwives), produces certified professional midwives (CPMs), practices in homebirths, and allows members to obtain their eduction in any way (self-study, university, apprenticeship). The validity of apprenticeship-training for midwives is has been a bone of contention between the two for years, though I thought that the ACNM had come a long way toward recognizing apprenticeship-trained midwives.
(You can read more about this in my article "A History of American Midwifery" - see sidebar. Personally, I favor apprenticeship-trained midwives and love both the method and the midwives that it produces).
Anyway, the ACNM has just published a statement which recognizes only the validity of university-trained midwives.... *sigh*. This means that they are acknowledging only nurse-midwives (CNMs) as 'real midwives' and discounting LM (licensed midwives) and CPMs.
To the ACNM: You are not benefiting anyone in the midwifery movement by publishing such divisive and unjustified language!
Read about it here and sign the petition to ask the ACNM to acknowledge the validity of all methods of midwifery training!
Incidentally, though, beware of being signed up for this site's action alerts, depending on your political views... I am very strongly pro-life, and after I signed up at this site a few years ago for environmental alerts, I started getting pro-choice literature constantly from them. So I use their site occasionally to support causes, but I am no longer a member.
Cheers, all!
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I've recently been in a discussion on a L&D labor nurse turned CNM's blog, and she and another CNM who chimed in both agree that the CPM certification is a better process for producing midwives to attend home birth. (But one CNM admitted that she did cringe when she was at a midwifery conference and she heard some questions from CPMs like "what's a subcutaneous?" and other questions which revealed a lack of medical knowledge among CPMs. Which is not surprising, considering that they don't work in a hospital, so don't have to know how to dose pitocin and do all the other medical stuff hospital staff have to do.
ReplyDelete-Kathy