Mamie Odessa Hale Garland: The Midwife

Robin Yates’s paper, “Pregnancy and Childbirth, The 1800’s vs. Now: What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting,” was filled with many clear points on the advancement of labor and medicine since the 1800s. This essay was filled with interesting and grabbing facts; however, the structure of the essay needs more support.

Midwives identify high risked pregnancies and they make referrals to doctors and other medical specialists.

Midwifery has been practiced in several communities of the world since time immemorial. A midwife is a trained person, mostly a woman, who assists in the pregnancy, delivery and post-partum care of an infant. In most countries of the world, the act of midwifery has been neglected for more modern and westernized medical practices deemed safer. In the First nations community, midwives have always been an integral part of the health system assisting expecting women during delivery. In the mid nineteenth and twentieth century, midwifery was outlawed in many communities and reserves ‘for the sake of the health of the country’ (Parkland Memorial Hospital School of Nurse Midwifery). With the outlaw of midwifery in First nation reserves, expectant mothers were transported to hospitals and clinics in urban centers for delivery. With this came several new challenges for expectant first nations women and mothers including, ‘increased maternal newborn complications, increased postpartum depression and decreased breast-feeding rates’ (O’Neil et al., 1990, Smith, 2002 and Klein et al., 2002a. The relegation of first nations midwifery has done more harm than good because it makes the birth process more medical, has led to the inflict of new post natal diseases and has led to the neglect of the traditional and spiritual roles in child

In the mid 1930’s childbirth was extremely dangerous and high percentages of women and their babies died sooner or later after birth. As people took notice, medicine took a lot of steps to lower the mortality rates. A lot of deliveries moved from the homes of people to the hospitals with more safer conditions of birth. Throughout the years, hosptials worked on getting their public sanitation, public nutrition and better control of some deadly chronic diseases. By the 1940s medicines surgical techniques and antibodies improved so much that it made the hospital that much more safer for people to deliver children. Medical Doctor, Elizabeth Eden, stated “By the 1950s, routine maternity care, originally designed to improve safety, had become almost too rigid. For example, the fear of infection, a major killer of mothers and babies, led to such practices as taking away all a woman's personal belongings when she entered the hospital; administering large, uncomfortable enemas; prohibiting fathers and other loved ones from entering the maternity area; keeping babies in nurseries, away from their mothers; and handling babies as little as possible. At the time, bottle-feeding was believed to be more sanitary and superior in almost every way to breast-feeding.” Medical Doctor, Elizabeth Eden also stated “The 1960s was a time when national and international organizations were founded to

This research consisted of key informants and general informants. These general informants were leaders in the community, granny midwives and African American and European American health care professionals. These general informants came from the clinics and hospitals where key informants were from. The key informants from each region were women who were either pregnant or had a baby within in a year preceding the study. (Marjorie Morgan, 1996)

In America, midwives attend less than 8% of all births and less than 1% of those occur outside a hospital. At the same time, the US

Women’s health is an important and rewarding field of study. Certified Nurse-Midwives or CNMs are Advanced Practice Registered Nurses provide education and care prior to conception, during pregnancy, childbirth and after delivery of a baby. CNMs work in settings that may include doctors’ offices, hospitals, birth centers, health clinics and attending patients’ homes for birth services or routine pre and post-natal care. CNMs also provide health care to women throughout their reproductive lives that may call for reproduction education, health visits, annual exams, and post-menopausal

Most Americans associate hospitals to be the standard place where women can give birth. However, women did not always deliver in hospitals. Gynecology, the medical practice dealing with the female reproductive system, did not emerge until the early nineteenth century. Before doctors came along, women used to hire midwives to deliver babies in the comfort of their own homes. In this paper I will examine the social, political, and scientific implications of how giving birth has transitioned from being a midwife’s job into that of a doctor’s. Furthermore, I will attempt to show how these implications intersect together to make birth a feminist issue. To support my argument, I will be referencing Tina Cassidy’s “The Dawn of the Doctors,” Abby Epstein’s documentary film The Business of Being Born, and Eesha Pandit’s article “America’s secret history of forced sterilization: Remembering a disturbing and not-so-distant past.” I argue that the processes surrounding birth are intersectional feminist issues because they are often manipulated by male figures pursuing money and authority, which ultimately compromises women’s health and power of choice.

Thirty-Five Native American tribes exist in Washington State. The Tulalip tribe resides in Marysville, Washington bordering the town that I live in. The Tulalip Tribes are the state’s second largest tribal group. In the past Cascade Midwives & Birth center, where I plan to practice my skills, has conducted mini prenatal clinics for expectant Tulalip mothers. While, in recent years it has not been as prevalent. Midwives have been integral for many underprivileged women to get quality healthcare throughout pregnancy. These women are typically marginalized in society but can be well served by midwives. Midwives are less threatening and believe in informal consent, they allow people to make their own decisions. This helps avoid the stigma of a

The author is a nurse in a level two trauma facility in a community of approximately fifty thousand people in Oregon. The community is a college-town surrounded by a large agricultural area. There is a minimal ethnic diversity within the community. The diversity present occurs mainly from internationally students and faculty from the college. There is a growing population of women who desire low interventional births in the community. The author has worked on the labor and delivery unit of the hospital for the last 14 years. The hospital is the only one in the area to offer trial of labor services to women who have previously undergone a cesarean section. The unit on average experiences around 1000 deliveries annually.

In the early twentieth century, the low to middle class women of the United States were burdened with frequent pregnancies often ending

“Brought to Bed”, by Judith Walzer Leavitt, is the story of childbirth in America from 1750 to 1970, and details how women in America dealt with childbirth or being “brought to bed”, the fears they had and how they coped with those fears, as well as the shift from using midwives who came to your home and having a large, female support network surround you, to using doctors and moving from the home setting into a hospital. The book is divided up into several sections, and used the diaries, letters, and notes from both women who were patients and the doctors who tended to them. These chapters deal with the transition from home to hospital by outlining different reasons for why this shift may have occurred, and who the driving force behind this was. The author poses a thesis, “By examining closely the ways childbirth has changed, I hope to illuminate some basic aspects of women’s lives in the past while at the same time analyzing the evolution of medical and

This is the beginning of the mother’s involvement with the midwife. This is an opportunity for both parties to establish a personal relationship, partnership. This is where education exchange can occur, recognition of responsibilities, options and choices are determined which are supported and discussed with the mother and her supporters. (Pairman, 2010, pg. 431-432)

This paper will focus on the differences and conflicts between doctors and midwifes. Doctors have been been the lead care providers for women for hundreds of years. Just short of one-hundred years ago Mary Breckinridge became the first midwife in the united states. Today there doctors and midwives have an ongoing feud. Many doctors feel as if midwives are uneducated and are not trained enough to provide health care to women, and do not agree with their more natural approach to child birth. However there conflict is slowly but surly being resolved, as many health care facilities are allowing midwives to have more authority in the work place. Secondly, this paper will go over the differences between doctors and midwives, many people are uneducated

MD Marden Wagner said, “In every country where I have seen real progress in maternity care, it was woman’s groups working together with midwives that made the difference.” The Marriam Webster dictionary defines midwifery as “The art or act of assisting at childbirth”. The definition is a spot-on explanation. Midwifery is not very broad; it’s pinpointed as a specific job with detailed instructions that only deal with pregnancies. Many will argue to say that midwives only work with women who are having “normal-pregnancies”.(Goer, 2002). Normal pregnancies include a healthy mother and fetus, with no complications. “Approximately 10% - 30% of pregnant women will experience Bacterial Vaginosis (BV) during their pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy happens in 1 out of 60 pregnancies. About 1% of all pregnant women will experience placental abruption, and most can be successfully treated depending on what type of separation occurs.” (Pregnancy Complications). Everyone is different, they handle pain in different ways, they have diverse fingerprints, they all have their own unique genetic material; evidently all pregnant women will experience each pregnancy they have differently from themselves and from other women. Many people will argue about the authenticity of a Certified Nurse Midwife’s education however, in reality “Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNM) are registered nurses, with a minimum of a