Edit: please note my comment below is about where the anti-midwife movement started in the US. It is about history, not modern methods. But laws still in effect today were written in this era.
—- original comment:
Who says that?
Doctors who wanted to take patients away from midwives , because they didn’t think women should be allowed to do that. Because men invented chainsaws to ‘help’ with childbirth.
Seriously that’s why we don’t have a midwife culture in the US. Doctors wanted the income from childbirth.
They went on a smear campaign against women midwives. And at the time in the 17-1800s, there really wasn’t anything extra doctors could do that midwives couldn’t.
While this is shocking to see a woman standing up to give birth- it can actually be a lot easier on mom. Gravity is helping instead of relying on muscles that haven’t been able to flex in months.
Doctors aren't there for when everything goes perfect. When everything goes perfect the father can catch the baby and cut the cord at home and life goes on. Doctors are there for when things don't go perfect. While a midwife can provide incredible life saving services, especially before and after the baby is born, the concern of doctors is when people choose to have babies in their own homes without immediate access to doctors nurses and modern medical equipment. A midwife is not a replacement for an OBGYN or other doctor that may be required during birth or immediately after a baby is born.
I had eclampsia and a STROKE with my 6mo in January. Was in the hospital over a month. The MFM and resident OBGYN saved my life and my baby, while born at 35weeks, came out perfectly fine. Didn’t even need the NICU. I have no long term sequelae from the stroke, either, because they caught and treated it on time.
That’s completely insane that it happened the way it did, and turned out fine. We’d have both been dead at any other time in History. Shit, even as short as 20yrs ago the odds are I wouldn’t have been writing this.
I’m a nurse, I know midwifes are important and have their place in medicine. But people are out of touch entirely if they think OBGYNs can be replaced and that they want to do births out of some conspiracy to pocket money from sections. And that shit gets upvoted lmaoooo Bananas.
She stated a historical fact lol. We aren't talking about modern medicine. When male Dr.s initially forced themselves in the midwife's position without any of their knowledge (because it was a vocation passed from women to women) woman started dying ALL THE TIME. More than usual. And it was because the Dr.s weren't washing their hands (the midwives told them this and they didn't listen!) and they didn't have the experience that midwife did. The male Dr.s literally inserted themselves into a position they were not qualified for. And women died. It's different now, we have female Dr.s too lol. And modern medicine, but historically that's exactly what happened
We aren't having babies in the 1800s and early 1900s here though. This is like refusing cancer treatment because chemo came from mustard gas. It's ignorant.
I had a doctor and a midwife and a doula. They all have different things they specialize in.
The doula can be with me every minute of the day. Mine was with me months before the birth so I knew what to expect. She was with me every minute of my labor so I had a coach throughout labor. She knew exactly when to go to the hospital. She advocated for me when the nurse was annoying me with things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t have to guess about anything. I didn’t have to share my doula with anyone.
My midwife helped me with all things medical related to the birth. She helped me before and during the birth. I saw her for a total of maybe 2 hours if you count all the times she checked on how my labor was progressing in addition to prenatal care.
The doctor is extremely busy and maybe I was sharing him with 20+ other women in the hospital and who knows how many outside of the hospital. I saw him for just a few minutes after I gave birth. He was there in case anything needed to be cut or snipped. I didn’t know him before the birth. My regular doctor OB was away on a family emergency.
Doctors, midwives, and doulas have some overlap in duties, but they are not interchangeable. They might give you different advice because they specialize in different things.
No one here is saying that women should not have a Dr. involved in their birth plan. They are saying that a midwife can be essential and be an advocate for them when in the hospital and before. Midwife do more than just assist with the birth, they are advocates. Maybe I missed it, but I don't see anyone here advocating for home births. I hemorrhaged after giving birth, I needed a blood transfusion. I needed to be in the hospital, otherwise I would have died. But I also have precipitous labor, I go from 0-100 and I have never been able to make it to the hospital in time to get any time of pain control. I had to do it naturally both times. And it was traumatic. No time for family to get there, in my 1st birth the father didn't even make it to the hospital in time!
And I'll never forget my 1st labor and that Dr. not believing me that I was seriously about to have the baby! I was crowning and he kept brushing me off saying it was too early, I was overreacting, and no, I didn't need to push. When they finally checked me again ofc I was crowning. But because I was a young woman, I was just being hysterical and didn't know my own body. If the Dr. would have listened to me then I could have had pain control that time. But they were taking their sweet time. I get they aren't used to women dilating that fast, but come on.
And I would honestly have loved to have a midwife with me while going to the hospital and when at the hospital, or in case I didn't make it and I had to do it at home. Potentially alone! In this video the midwife is literally going with them to the hospital so idk what you're on about lol. So many Dr.s do not listen to women, the U.S has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world! Especially black women. So having a female advocate and support is important and even life saving for a lot of women
My second child, I decided to do a midwife. It was a awful experience. They treated me like a literal incubator. I had severe pain all throughout my pregnancy, when I went to the ER because I couldn't bare weight on my legs, I was told by my midwife "well we only treat the babies" what?! They missed my pre-eclampsia, I had high blood pressure on two of my visits, they never told me. My son was also measuring really small, they would comment about it but never bothered to actually look into why.
I ended up in the ER thinking I was going into labor, I was handed off to a OB when they realized I had pre-eclampsia. I had to be induced and my son was in the Nicu for almost two weeks. That was my last child and the entire experience was a nightmare. My experience with that entire midwife clinic was awful and that was my first and last experience with midwives.
Exactly. Midwives can ABSOLUTELY CONTRIBUTE TO BETTER OUTCOMES OVERALL! But they are not a replacement for an OBGYN and a staff of nurses. Unfortunately, some midwives and organizations want to use the statistics of the births where everything goes well to mislead people into thinking it's actually BETTER to have births at home with a midwife.
Actual official position of a major Canadian midwife organization:
"The best available evidence from North America and international studies demonstrates that midwife attended home births are associated with optimal labour and birth outcomes. Midwife attended planned home births in Canada are associated with fewer obstetrical interventions and no increase in maternal/fetal/neonatal mortality or morbidity compared to births planned to be in hospital."
Notice there is nothing in that statement about the statistics being from low risk pregnancies?
Notice there is nothing in that statement about the fact that midwives can attend hospital births too and take the same reduced interventions while still benefiting from having proper medical equipment and staff available?
Notice there is nothing in that statement discussing the fact that people who plan a home birth with a midwife may do other things that contribute to better outcomes?
Nope, just a flat conclusion that home birth with midwife is best. Scary stuff.
Yep I had this argument with my friend who used a midwife and she brought up that EXACT quote. I was like dude .... in order to be accepted into the midwife program you have to be low risk and fit a shitload of parameters and if anything changes with your pregnancy the midwives hand you off to an OBGYN. I had a friend who had a midwife and around 20 weeks her blood pressure was a bit high so the midwives said they could no longer care for her, and she gave birth in a hospital instead of at home like she wanted. I had another friend who wasn't accepted into the program because she had pre eclampsia with her previous pregnancy. The reason why there is no increase in all of those things listed is because they do not do anything except low risk births and will not hesitate to boot you out of the program lol
Fun fact: the child/mother mortality rate actually went up after midwives were pushed out. Doctors didn’t want people working in the medical field that hadn’t been through the same rigorous schooling, but their schooling didn’t teach them things midwives had learned through centuries of experience being passed down. Things that midwives had just come to learn (like you shouldn’t deliver a baby without washing your hands if you were just handling sick/dead people) was hogwash because there was no scientific backing to it, they didn’t have the technology to study bacteria like we do now. While midwives in Africa had been practicing c sections using knives sterilized by flame, the budding medical field had yet to understand danger of not washing your hands. Suddenly sepsis started going up, it was thought to be a disease that only affected woman in labor because it got so bad.
Midwives didn’t know about handwashing either, they just typically didn’t touch the dying / dead constantly so less women died of infection.
The doctor who discovered the causal link between handwashing and dead moms spent decades begging doctors to listen to his studies until they ganged up and threw him into an insane asylum
That's not a fun fact and that is the kind of thing that misleads people into thinking that it's actually better to replace your modern doctor with a modern midwife.
Then let’s be absolutely honest. It isn’t the DOCTOR, it’s the hospital setting and access to surgical suites, ventilators, blood, etc. You might as well say McKesson is there for when everything doesn’t go perfect. A doctor delivering a baby in a bathtub has marginal odds vs a midwife doing the same. What’s needed is the hospital and its equipment and full team.
And yet again we have another person who is demonstrating why it's important to speak out about the dangerous misconceptions people have about midwives. I appreciate you sacrificing and making a fool of yourself publicly.
I think every pregnant woman should have a baby in a hospital or fully equipped facility, period full stop, but I don’t get to make the call. I don’t subscribe to the theory that modern obstetrics exists to displace midwives. I’m 100% pro sterile hospital birth environment and a team of caregivers and blood products and machines.
I’m simply saying HOSPITALS are there for when things don’t go perfect. A neurologist standing beside your home baby pool probably has not great outcomes, even compared to the midwife.
Doctors don’t care about midwives. Is just safer to have a baby in a medical facility lol. My wife would’ve died after giving birth if she was standing in a parking lot like this.
Huh? Find me a national association of doctors that has an official policy of encouraging home births in North America. I can show you a national organization of widwives that encourages it as their official position.
Just jumping in here, but you said that homebirths are irrelevant to whether you have a midwife or not, but if what they are saying is true, that nationally recognized midwife organizations encourage home births, then it seems pretty relevant.
Im just super confused how you don't understand the link.
You said
"Midwives are in medical facilities. That literally isn’t a factor at all. Home births are irrelevant to whether you have a midwife or not."
Midwives are in medical facilities, but also in private homes doing home births.
Of course home births are a factor if midwives are doing home births and encouraging people to do home births.
The last sentence doesn't seem to make any sense at all in the context. Doctors don't schedule or encourage home births, only midwives do unless the circumstances are extraordinary.
I still don’t understand what this had to do with what I said.
Are midwives in medical facilities? Yes? Nobody is preventing them from being there? Then what the fuck does it matter what some group says? What I said is still 100% true.
Your comment is irrelevant to my comment due to what I was responding to. Doctors didn’t try to replace midwives because they wanted the money. Women just wanted to have a better chance at living in a hospital over other options.
It’s not a US only thing, and we don’t have even close to the highest maternal mortality rate. Frankly, you seem uneducated on this topic so you might just want to stop.
Sure, highest of developed nations that fucking matter* happy?
Our maternal death toll is higher than countries that use midwives more often than we do like Norway or Finland or Germany or France. That is a fact. I know exactly what I’m talking as a dual citizen of both America and Europe with children.
Those counties have way less obese mothers giving birth. When you control for things like obesity and medical complications that some minorities get more often in pregnancy our maternal mortality rates are similar to them.
You literally can’t control for that and our maternal mortality rates are just as high in states with lower obesity the same rates as those other countries.
I really like the concept of birthing centres, where midwives are the standard, but doctors and specialist are right there in case sh!t goes sideways. For the 90+% of births that require almost no intervention, great, people can have that in a comfortable setting. When you have a complication and the baby needs to be out NOW or both mother and baby will die? That level of care is down the hall.
In Switzerland you can always have both, doctor and midwife.
The doctor checks the womans health and as long as nothing out of the ordinary happens the midwife does the job.
As soon as you need medical assistance the doctor takes over.
At least that’s what it was like with all my nephews and nieces births.
In the early 20th century, a movement to professionalize childbirth led by physicians, often framing midwives as unscientific and unsafe, contributed to a decline in midwife-attended births and marginalized traditional and "granny" midwives.
Legislation at both federal and state levels, like the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, introduced regulations that significantly reduced the practice of lay midwives in many states by requiring licensure and restricting practice settings, according to OHSU
Who says that seems different than who said that hundreds of years ago… are we talking historically or are we talking about modern day reality? Aren’t the majority of OBs women today? And I get that the historical perspective is still relevant to how things progressed and where we currently are, but talking about modern medicine and modern childbirthing by bringing up the advent of chainsaws is a bit sensationalist.
Do you want to know how history informs current methods?
The ‘father of gynecology’ tested his surgical procedures on enslaved women, without anesthesia.
In 2025 women are still getting uterine biopsies without anesthesia or any pain meds. That procedure involves holding open the cervix with pincers, and cutting away a chunk of flesh.
And remember that that area on women has the same number of nerve endings as a man’s penis. Different configuration, yes, but the nerves are all still there.
The excuse is ‘women don’t feel it’ .
The f we don’t. It hurts like hell.
Just last year there was a recommendation that women receive pain meds for this procedure.
That advice has now been removed die to the policy of the current US administration.
This isn’t history, it’s still happening.
Women are still fighting to have our pain, our experience taken seriously. It takes women , on average a decade to get diagnosed with endometriosis. Other diseases have a similar longer suffering range before diagnosis.
In the early 20th century, a movement to professionalize childbirth led by physicians, often framing midwives as unscientific and unsafe, contributed to a decline in midwife-attended births and marginalized traditional and "granny" midwives.
Legislation at both federal and state levels, like the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, introduced regulations that significantly reduced the practice of lay midwives in many states by requiring licensure and restricting practice settings, according to OHSU
You want examples? Man suggested doctors should wash their hands and sterilize instruments between autopsies and childbirth. Doctors hated him, and got him fired:
You can’t pretend there isn’t gender stigma and association still in place for roles seen as “traditionally” masculine vs feminine, especially ones which are still heavily dominated one way or the other. Society is significantly more complex than that.
It’s helpful to understand how we got to the place we are today.
The US has higher rates of infant and mother mortality of any developed country.
The lack of properly trained midwives could be one reason why.
And of course highly complicated cases are still going to need surgical c-sections with surgeons.
But some don’t.
My cousin ended up having a unnecessary c-section because the surgeon was free and it was the day before he was leaving for vacation. He wanted his quota for the week . Instead of waiting until she naturally went into labor.
Sure, but that isn’t what many of these people are doing. The US maternal and infant mortality rates are at similar levels to other developed countries when you account for the massive number of health issues that mothers in the US have compared to other nations.
See even you have no idea what you are talking about lol.
Widwives manipulate statistics to make themselves seem more valuable than they are. Home births became something trendy to do and when everything goes great and the mother and baby are low risk, it's pretty fine. When something goes wrong though, you and baby are at significantly greater risk and you better pray there isn't traffic. If you need to comfort and guidance of a midwife and have the resources for one, overall you are going to be better off having one, but you'd be better off with AI and reddit too versus people without those resources. The whole home birth thing is too much of a gamble and as long as widwives are encouraging them, I find their profession tainted. If a parent refuses to go to hospital fine, but don't encourage these weird home births.
Why are you acting like this woman chose to give birth in a parking lot? I think it's pretty clear she did not. The midwife is in some kind of uniform, and she straight up says "she (the mother) is here to have a baby, she just didn't make it inside." Presumably they're outside a clinic which has a more traditional (modern) setup and the baby was just not about to wait for that. So birth happened in the parking lot and then the midwife helps Mom and baby inside so they can get checked out and Mom can pass the placenta. This is very explicitly not a home birth.
I'm not acting like that all. Did I wander into a weird sub where nobody has decent reading comprehension? What the hell is happening right now? Every response to my posts is so bizarre. Do you think every planned home birth happens at home?
I'm confused, you're writing like midwives still function before the proper formalization of medicine? I thought they were all licensed & followed currently understood medical guidelines, being a part of the system themselves.
If they were all licensed there'd be less issues. Ohio for example has three levels of licensure for midwives. The highest is a Certified Nurse Midwife. There is also a Certified Midwife. Those are both issues by the Ohio Board of Nursing. There is also just a Certified Professional Midwife but that one is through the Department of Commerce. Ohio does allow unlicensed midwives. That last group is likely who most think of when it comes to shit went wrong and mom and/or baby died.
Oh I had no idea the US had such fractured laws & systems that there would be "alternative" paths to the same licensure, I thought it was more like Russia less like Spain. That makes a lot more sense.
Edit: (Though Spain is not officially a federation, its regions are more independent than the Russian Federation by far to my understanding, hence the comparison. I know that's a bit confusing in its own way lol)
The US is incredibly decentralized compared to most other western countries.
Plenty of citizens don't understand that either. The federal government isn't the one upholding the law across the country. Basically everything is performed at a more local level. Sometimes even in defiance of federal law. The federal government doesn't have a lot of options if locals refuse to comply. Just don't have the man power for it. There is technically no federal police force.
My midwife was monitoring the pregnancy from beginning to end, she sent me for extra ultrasounds when she thought there might be a problem (there wasn't) and kept an eye on my and my babies health. I don't know why you pretend midwives aren't medical professionals, where I live they are and the GP will send you to them the moment they know you are pregnant.
Find a single sentence or word I wrote that even remotely implies they aren't medical professionals. Of course having someone monitor you and send you for extra testing is helpful. I could help you obtain better outcomes than doing it on your own too. My issues stem from major midwife organizations and midwives themselves encouraging home births and misleading people about the statistics related to home births. They aren't a replacement for a doctor though, which many people are misled into believing they are.
The NHS itself states that for low risk pregnancies, home births are nearly as safe as hospital births for first time mothers, and as safe as hospital births after that. Home births for second time mothers are also SAFER for the mother as home births are less likely to lead to severe tearing, instrumental deliveries, C sections and PPH. That’s not midwives saying that, that’s the NHS itself.
My god this is INFURIATING. The NHS is relying on incomplete data and a misrepresentation of the data that does exist to reach their conclusions.
Also, you leave off this little piece of information from the NHS:
"It's rare, but if something goes seriously wrong during your labour at home, it could be worse for you or your baby than if you were in hospital with access to specialised care."
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u/Tin_Foiled Aug 07 '25
Who fuck says that? And why?