* Rachel Hinton…
llinois moved closer to allowing midwifery to be a licensed profession on Tuesday under legislation signed into law by Gov. J.B. Pritzker that he and others hoped would save lives.
“Reproductive health is not one size fits all,” Pritzker said. “Whether it’s an expectant mother with a preexisting condition, or a woman looking for culturally informed care, these deeply personal needs and procedures require comprehensive options.”
Those options will now include midwives after the bill goes into effect in October.
Certified nurse-midwives provide women with primary health care, including gynecological exams, delivering babies and prenatal and postnatal care, according to the Illinois Affiliate of the American College of Nurse-Midwives.
The legislation Pritzker signed into law Tuesday allows for midwives to go through a newly created licensing process to provide care before, during and after delivery that can be “life saving,” Pritzker said.
I know people who’ve waited for this day for a very long time. I’m happy for them.
* Fox 32…
Currently, only midwives with nursing degrees can practice in Illinois.
The legislation states that a person must be certified by the North American Registry of Midwives (NARM) and requires completion of an accredited postsecondary midwifery education program in order to be licensed to perform out-of-hospital births.
Those who have been accredited by NARM but have not completed the necessary education program can still be licensed if they have practiced as a certified professional midwife for more than three years and hold other certifications. […]
The bill goes into effect Oct. 1, 2022.
GOP Rep. CD Davidsmeyer and Democratic Sen. Julie Morrison were the only “No” votes.
- Norseman - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 10:18 am:
Wow, this happened with or without ISMS support? Things are a changing.
- Candy Dogood - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 10:36 am:
===Wow, this happened with or without ISMS support?===
Regulating something that already exists and should be regulated is a good thing. As a society we should be ashamed of our maternal mortality rates and I am hopeful that this change will help improve that.
How we have structured our healthcare system has made it so that some of the best medical students seek out dermatology residencies and it’s easier to get prescribed boner pills than it is to get prescribed birth control.
Maybe in a few years this will be something that we’ll have the political will to fix instead of dealing with extremists that rage over the idea of teaching that slavery was bad and want to burn books where anything remotely related to racism or LGBTQ issues are a plot point.
Always easier to burn books than to solve problems so we should celebrate when the party that runs on book burning shows up to help solve a problem.
- OneMan - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 10:36 am:
Good.
- Perplexed - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 10:59 am:
It all sounds so homey and heartfelt, although not to families who’ve lost babies to unexpected crises in home births.
Midwives always reassure parents-to-be that “If there’s an unanticipated emergency, we’ll call an ambulance.” True. So let’s tip our hats to all the Illinois EMTs, paramedics, hospital ER docs and on-call OB/GYNs who’ll be expected to perform even more miracle rescues when infants or their mothers have crises at home.
An exaggeration? Look an OB/GYN in the eye and ask him or her how often midwives have confronted them with life-and-death emergencies. Hospitals don’t want their docs giving the honest answer, which is, “Often.” Why the culture of silence? Because midwives deliver enough cases in-hospital to be a good source of revenue for the institution.
And everything is safe and cozy, until it isn’t.
- Say what? - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 11:26 am:
Sounds great until the first medical huge liability suit. Medical liability insjramce may well prove to be prohibitive for this group. Particularly when OB/GYN’s, the current deep pockets from a liability perspective, back away from cases where they have no knowledge of pre-natal care.
- Candy Dogood - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 12:35 pm:
=== Look an OB/GYN in the eye and ask him or her how often midwives have confronted them with life-and-death emergencies.===
There are some parts of the state where it would be difficult to find this physician to ask the question, and if you did happen to find them — a pretty good chance you might have to wait a couple of hours for them to show up, if not more.
There are parts of our State where the is a real shortage of providers and we’re not the only state which experiences that. In an ideal world we’d have plenty of doctors, but the feed in pipeline to get all of those doctors has a lot of pretty inflexible barriers, like medical school capacities, available residency programs to train, and so forth.
Illinois is address those issues as well with efforts to increase the number of medical students in the state as well as the number of residency programs, but it’s pretty difficult to maintain a hard line for someone with an MD and a physicians license when there’s a shortage of people meeting those criteria.
- froganon - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 12:54 pm:
Good News. Hopefully, this will open the door to more rural, maternity health care. Maternal death rates are appalling in our supposedly first world country. Much more needs to be done to make reproductive health care available to all women and to support families with children.
- DuPage - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 2:20 pm:
Lowering the standards for midwives in Illinois is a horrible idea. Everything is fine until the umbilical cord gets wrapped around the baby’s neck. An immediate emergency C-section is needed, and all the midwife can do is call an ambulance. The consequences for the baby and the family can be very serious. Death or lifetime disability can occur from a few minutes of oxygen being cut off.
Midwifes are already allowed in Illinois, and a trained nurse-midwife would realize the need for the C-section and act quickly. A just-anybody midwife with much less medical training might not realize a problem as quickly and have a worse outcome. The state has a few homes for disabled adults, (I knew of one down by Dwight). They care for adults who are mentally 4 or 5 years old and will be that way for the rest of their lives. One of the typical causes of that is oxygen cut off at birth.
- Dotnonymous - Wednesday, Dec 15, 21 @ 2:41 pm:
Around eight percent of human births are complicated enough to require intervention…that’s not a small number when considering the tragic consequences.
Women and newborn babies have the right to Physician assisted birthing…especially when unforeseen complications arise.