May 12, 1999

'Midwife Show' educates about role in birthing

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       Throw out your preconceived notions about midwifery and birth and turn into The Midwife Show for an update on modern midwifery. From home to birthing center to hospital, today's midwife is following in the footsteps her sisters blazed from the dawn of mankind: providing women with a safe, satisfactory and cost-effective birth choices.
      The Midwife Show had its debut last Wednesday on tctv2, airing the first episode in honor of International Midwives Day.
      "Midwifery is a way of thinking, of looking at birth as a natural, normal event, not an illness that needs to be cured or fixed," said Kathi Mulder, a certified professional midwife and owner of Dance of Life Midwifery Service in Traverse City. "It is woman-centered care that is safe for both mother and baby."
      Produced by Mulder, Geradine Simpkins and Kim O'Black, The Midwife Show is a series of 12 shows that will explain modern midwifery in the context of its history. The oldest helping profession, midwifery in the United States is often viewed with suspicion and fear and the producers of the show, all midwives themselves, want to change these misconceptions.
      "Our goal with the TV show is to get the word out to the public about the midwifery model of care," said Simpkins, director of Birthways Midwifery, Inc., and a nurse-midwife with the Migrant Health Program. "With so many midwives in our area, the community has a opportunity to partake of midwife care but they don't know what we do."
      The Grand Traverse region boasts 13 midwives in six different practices spanning the spectrum of modern midwifery care, from in-home birth attended by a traditional midwife to hospital delivery with a Certified Nurse-Midwife. Educational backgrounds are as varied, ranging from university education with a master's degree in nursing to non-nurse professional certification to apprenticeships.
      Midwives in the area also provide a full range of pre natal, birth, and post natal care. Few people realize that Certified Nurse-Midwives also provide a full range of well woman and well baby care, Simpkins said.
      "The wonderful thing about coming to a Nurse-Midwife for care is that first of all she's a woman," Simpkins said. "She knows what it is like to be pregnant, to give birth, to have a woman's body."
      The first episode of The Midwife Show discusses the history of midwifery and will air three more times this month. A little know fact is that at the beginning of this century, midwives attended 95 percent of all births in the United States. By 1975 that figure had reversed to 95 percent of births attended by doctors and 5 percent by midwives. This is a contrast to the rest of the world today, where midwives attend 80 percent of all births.
      The series will also follow three families as they go through pregnancy and birth with a midwife providing care. It will show prenatal visits, discuss issues surrounding birth and having a new baby in the family from the viewpoint of fathers, mothers and siblings. It will also focus on family-centered home births and hospital-based midwifery, holistic approaches to birth and provide a series of birth stories.
      Simpkins, Mulder and O'Black came up with the idea for a show after the nationwide Midwife Alliance of North America conference was held last November in Traverse City. They realized that they wanted a way to tell people about midwifery and all the choices today.
      "If we can get people in the door, we believe we can keep them," said Simpkins of Cedar, who has been a midwife in the area for 22 years. "It is just a matter of getting the word out about midwifery."
      Mulder, current president of Michigan Midwifes Association, which was the host chapter for the conference, accompanied her daughter's 4th grade class last fall on a field trip to the tctv2 studio. She suddenly realized that they could actually produce a show about midwifery themselves and all three signed up for the 10-week class to learn to be certified operators.
      Soon they were having brainstorming sessions to lay out the series. For the three women, it was not only a matter of writing the script and learning to work the cameras but learning to be on camera.
      "We did a practice show and realized how you need to talk to come across better on camera," Mulder said. "This was all new to us, none of us even own a TV."