Midwifery Today began as a magazine for midwives, birth practitioners, and parents. We later expanded to offer international and domestic conferences and educational reach through this website. We now offer online memberships, books, and e-books, as well as audios of past conference classes. All Toward Better Birth.
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Kneeling before the Elders by Sister MorningStar Doña Cuca and I sat next to each other looking down at the ground. She was sad. I was too. She spoke of the changes happening in her village around birth. The wimyn were trusting the hospital more than the use of rebozo and sobada (1). The young ones were not interested in a midwife path. She felt the feeling of disappearance. The dissolving of a life she had lived and loved. I told her the loss had already happened for my people and in my land. We sat together. Sad about it all. Read more…. Kneeling before the Elders
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“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”
Kofi Annan
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Trauma always leaves a scar. It follows us home. It changes our lives. Trauma messes everybody up. But maybe that’s the point. All the pain and the fear and the crap. Maybe going through all that is what keeps us moving forward. It’s what pushes us. Maybe we have to get a little messed up, before we can step up.
Grey’s Anatomy
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Be bold. Be proud. Persist in spreading the word that midwives are not only experts in normal birth, but also expert at keeping birth normal.
Judy Edmunds, CPM
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…in feeding babies, two substantial mammary glands are more useful than the two hemispheres of a professor’s brain.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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It was a natural consequence that all obstetric procedures had their indication widened as their relative safety became established. But that any operation, because asepsis makes it reasonably safe and anesthesia keeps the patient quiet during its performance, should be so inordinately broadened in its scope that the suspicion is evidence that it is being done for the convenience and conservation of time of the operator, is a travesty on scientific endeavor.
H. Schwarz, MD. 1919
Opening the Pelvic Brim with Walcher’s Position by Gail Tully This past year, two labors I attended benefited (meaning we avoided a cesarean each time) from a technique shared over a hundred years ago by Dr. Walcher. The first of these mothers labored for her third homebirth after four previous cesareans. She’d had a hard time getting her first baby into her pelvis (lying in bed) and was given a c-section at 3 cm and then she had three more cesareans in following years. Umm hmm. So, I was honored to help at her first homebirth, her fifth child. He also took a long time to engage. Beginning posterior, a variety of positions eventually got him through. Her second homebirth occurred after a long latent phase but before her midwife arrived.
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Read more…. Opening the Pelvic Brim with Walcher’s Position
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 71
An Impulse to Soar: Quotations by Women on Leadership, compiled by Rosalie Maggio
Leaders have a passion and they have a picture or vision at some distance from the current reality. They use their passion to move them toward that vision, whether it’s something for their company, for themselves or for their cause.
Sandy Linver
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 72
The greatest use of a life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
Anne and Ray Ortlund
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 73
Throw out the rule book.
Barbara Harper
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 85
It was a natural consequence that all obstetric procedures had their indication widened as their relative safety became established. But that any operation, because asepsis makes it reasonably safe and anesthesia keeps the patient quiet during its performance, should be so inordinately broadened in its scope that the suspicion is evidence that it is being done for the convenience and conservation of time of the operator, is a travesty on scientific endeavor.
H. Schwarz, MD. 1919
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 91
Women’s bodies have their own wisdom, and a system of birth refined over 100,000 generations is not so easily overpowered.
Sarah Buckley
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 88
…in feeding babies, two substantial mammary glands are more useful than the two hemispheres of a professor’s brain.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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