May 10, 2000
Parents group offers midwife conference
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
At home, in water, naturally at the hospital - with 12 midwives practicing in the Grand Traverse region, birthing choices for area families are no longer a one-size-fits-all approach.
These midwives' training ranges from certified nurse midwives to certified professional midwives to traditional midwives. Their practices vary from sole practitioners doing home births to nurse midwives who catch babies in the hospital. There is even a midwife who is affiliated with an ob/gyn practice in town.
The unifying theme and philosophy for all the different flavors of midwife is to give families and mothers the opportunity for a gentle, safe and empowering birth experience.
Bringing together information about this breadth of birth options, Parents for Healthcare Choices sponsored the 'Choices in Childbirth: Midwifery Model of Care' seminar Wednesday evening at the Traverse Area District Library. More than 70 people listened to a lecture by two area midwives - one doing home births and one who doing hospital births - and a roundtable discussion that featured midwives, a chiropractor, a massage therapist and a mother who had a midwife-attended birth.
"I wanted to have our organization be a resource of information that you otherwise would not find in traditional medicine," said Melanie Cruse, founder of Parents for Healthcare Choices who gave birth to the last of her three children at home. "Since I worked so hard to find out all this information I wanted to share it."
Conference organizers had attendees like Heather Neitzke of Traverse City in mind when they put the evening together. She and her husband, Scott Keely, are expecting their first child in late November. They came to the conference to hear more about midwifery - a topic that had never crossed their minds until a few months ago. Curiosity, plus the fact that Heather's doctor has a midwife in his practice, prompted them to check out the idea of midwifery care. While they have not made any decisions yet, they were pleased by what they learned.
"Hearing what they said is making me think more in that direction," Neitzke said. "I think what people had to say about midwifery was real positive, those women who had births with a midwife. It is nice to have so many options."
The option of midwifery continues to grow in popularity as studies prove its safety, efficacy and cost-effectiveness. Longer pre-natal visits, continuous contact and support during labor plus counseling and education for the mother and family all contribute to positive birth experiences.
For the 98 percent of normal pregnancies, medical intervention during birth is unnecessary, said Kathi Mulder a certified professional midwife who founded Dance of Life Midwifery in Traverse City.
"Midwifery is not some New Age, hippie thing; women have always helped women give birth," Mulder said. "Eighty percent of babies born in the world today had midwives. Midwives are the true guardians of normal birth."
In fact, the midwifery model of care has been shown to be an asset to both the mother and baby. A 1995 National Center for Health Statistics study showed lower infant mortality rates and less chance of a low birthweight baby compared to physician-attended births. By 1995, midwives caught six percent of all babies born in the United States, up from three percent in 1989.
"Birth is a perfectly designed process that remains the same for women all over the world," Mulder said. "We live in a fear-based culture that is afraid of pain, birth and death where we have gone from birth being normal and natural process to a high-tech medical event."
With all that midwives focus on women, fathers of babies are not left out of the midwifery model of care. From the outset, fathers are encouraged to attend prenatal visits and are an integral partner in the birth process.
"Our home birth was fantastic, from my standpoint I felt so much more involved," said Rod Cruse, whose wife, Melanie, founded Parents for Healthcare Choices. "I did have reservations initially, but with some education about home births and midwives, they went away very quickly."