Tracey Johnstone is a home birth midwife who has been serving the greater Cincinnati area since 2005. Before that she resided in Chicago, IL where she was Special Projects Director for Chicago Community Midwives, Chicago Coordinator for the 2004 International Waterbirth Congress, and a founding member of the Coalition for Illinois Midwifery, along with having a diverse urban home birth practice. Tracey has been involved with midwifery legislation and professional development issues since the time of her apprenticeship in the early 1990’s. It is Tracey’s hope that legislation regulating Certified Professional Midwives will be the first of many initatives that OFSB takes on to improve maternity care and perinatal outcomes in Ohio.

Ohio Families for Safe Birth is working on a project that will keep our mission and vision in front of our state representatives all through 2009!

We will produce a 2009 desk calendar featuring pictures of babies born at home in Ohio - one for every month. On the cover, the calendar will have the OFSB logo, the OFSB mission statement, and the message, “Ohio Families Deserve Access to Licensed Certified Professional Midwives.” Each month will feature a photograph of a child who was born at home in Ohio in that month, with a caption: (Example: “Isaiah C., born at home in Cincinnati, Ohio, December 2005, with the help of an unlicensed midwife.”)

These calendars will be available for sale for anyone who wants them. The cost will probably be about $6 each includng shipping. You (or your spouse) can put them on your office desk if you work in a place where others would see it and it could be a conversation starter. You can give one to your doctor or chiropractor or real estate agent (hey, he probably sends you a calendar!)

The main goal, however, will be to get one of these calendars on the desk of each of the 33 senators and 99 members of the house of representatives in Ohio by the end of this year. This is how we’ll do it:

Once the calendars are ready, you will have the opportunity to “sponsor” a calendar for your state senator or house representative. For $6, we will send you the calendar addressed and ready to mail (or hand-deliver, if you choose) to your Ohio state representative. We ask you to include a personalized holiday card (with a picture of your child or children who was born at home in Ohio, if applicable) asking your representative to support licensure for certified professional midwives. We will keep track of which legislators have already been given a calendar. If your district rep and senator are both already “taken” by someone else, you can still help make sure every legislator gets a calendar by “sponsoring” a calendar for a less active district, which will be sent from OFSB with a note from the board. (If you do this, please still send a holiday card to your own reps!) You may sponsor as many calendars as you like, but we should be able to get a calendar to everyone in the legislature without anyone having to pay for more than one.

How you can help:

We need beautiful, high-quality photographs to use for the calendar. These are the requirements:

• the photograph must be of a child who was born in Ohio with a direct-entry midwife (the year of birth is not so important, but the photograph should have been taken within the first year of the child’s life.)
• you, the parent must be able to sign a release form authorizing OFSB’s use of the photograph
• you must be willing to have the calendar include your child’s name (first names only are fine), place of birth, and birth date (month and year only is fine), and you must include that information with the photograph
• because these calendars are targeted at legislators and we don’t want to inadvertantly cause any offense, we will avoid any “right after birth” photos that might make more conservative legislators uncomfortable, and stick to just pictures of clothed babies. If you have more “birthy” photos that you want to share, please submit them for the Sunday Photo album.
• in order to have the calendar produced and ready to distribute this holiday season, please submit your photos by the 20th of October
• please send your submission electronically to soracolvin@gmail.com or by mail to Sora Colvin, 300 Cox St., Mason, OH 45040. In either case, include both your full-quality, high resolution image and the completed, signed photo release form (may be downloaded from the OFSB website: as a pdf or as a Microsoft Word document
• please forward this information to anyone you know who may be interested in participating in this calendar project

Because of the nature of the project, we may not be able to use every photograph that is submitted. Submitting a photograph does not guarantee it will be used in the calendar.

Thanks for your help in making this project a success!

I’m Amy Erlewine. I’m a doula and recent transplant to the Athens area. My path to birth work was a circuitous one. I was born and raised in southeast Texas and pursued my bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Texas at Austin. It was there that I began to be exposed to the birth community through volunteer work at the local hospital. After graduation, I worked in a clinical setting helping to run clinical trials for new pharmaceuticals. Through this I ended up relocating to northern California and working for a top biotech in their clinical operations department.

In the midst of all this, I had my daughter. She was born via induction in a hospital setting. My birth and post-partum experience were not what I had expected or been told they would be. This was my first inkling that we needed alternatives to hospital birth.

After years of interest, I finally took the plunge to become a trained doula after my sister-in-law’s beautiful out-of-hospital birth of my nephew. I finished my training in April of this year and am currently working towards certification. My family and I moved to Athens (where my husband grew up) to be closer to family and allow me to pursue my career as a doula.

My long term goal is to become a Certified Professional Midwife which is the main reason I stepped in to be a regional representative for southeast Ohio. I hope that by the time I’m pursuing my studies it will be legal for me to practice as a licensed CPM in the state of Ohio.

I was born in the flatlands of NW Ohio, the third child of a card carrying La Leche League mother breast fed on a diet of natural ways…

Completing a degree in psychology at Bowling Green State University, I fell in love with travel discovering along the way the variety of approaches to life and a healthy respect of the power and  grace of the human body.  In short, there’s more than one way to do things.

Well traveled in Central American countries I also lived a short time near the caffeine-pubs of Seattle (grande, soy, vanilla, latte, please) before returning to Ohio.  Not long after…. I wound up at Ohio State University working in the field of technology……and then marrying the love of my life, Terry (he told me to say that).

Starting out  my pregnancy with a traditional OB/CNM practice (nice-enough, not-so-encouraging, capable people), I soon chose a local homebirth midwife (personal, supportive, capable woman). I chose the care I thought would allow my son and I the best chance at a natural birth.

In the spring of 2007, after 17 hours of homebirthing and 1 hour at OSU hospital, Sam was born. The experience strengthened my belief that women should always have a choice in how, where and with whom they give birth.

To help you keep track of upcoming Ohio Families for Safe Birth events: the new online OFSB Calendar.

I am the Chair of Ohio Families for Safe Birth.  I live with my husband and two daughters (Amira and Victoria, both born in Ohio) in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Madisonville. We moved to Cincinnati five years ago, after living in Washington, DC for nine years.  During most of those years, I worked in Field operations for non-profit organizations, developing trainings and communications pieces to help members better understand how to communicate with their elected officials and how to influence the legislative process. 

Since moving to Ohio, I have been increasingly involved in faith-based community organizing through my parish.   Today, I am the State Coordinator for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, combining my training and advocacy experience with faith-based community organizing.   

I bring a passion for this coalition-based birth work based on my own experience of birthing.  With my first, I went into the hospital armed for battle after our Bradley Method class to achieve a natural birth and rolled out recovering from a c-section.  With our second daughter, I decided to skip the hospital battles and birth at home with a direct entry midwife.  

My personal and professional experiences combine in a profoundly fulfilling way to help me lead Ohio Families for Safe Birth in the effort to license midwives in Ohio.

My name is Amy Wakeling.  I am originally from Zanesville, Ohio, and moved to Columbus after we had our first child.  I am now the mother of 3 children, with a husband who is a truck driver, and 2 mastiffs!  I went through doula training about 2 yrs ago and about 6 months into that I attended my first out of hospital birth with a VBAC client of mine.  It was then that I realized midwifery was where I really belonged, and began an apprenticeship a little over a year ago. Seeing the challenges that my preceptor has had to face and hearing of many others, I decided to get involved in moving the Profession of Midwifery forward in the State of Ohio by helping to get licensure.  So I took the position of Fundraising for Ohio Families for Safe Birth!  Having had a background in sales in my pre-birthing career gives me a good base for working creatively to have fun and earn some funds at the same time!

Ohio Families for Safe Birth has grown and developed since its inception, and the transition to a board structure from the initial steering committee that guided OFSB through its first year is now complete. The first in-person board meeting took place recently in Columbus. The board draws its membership from all over the state and is made up primarily of consumers. The diverse backgrounds, skills, and experiences of OFSB’s board members creates a dynamic leadership team guided by the mission of supporting public health policy grounded in the Midwives’ Model of Care. In our initial CPM Licensure Initiative, OFSB is working closely with the Ohio Midwives’ Alliance as well as with the National Birth Policy Coalition’s Big Push for Midwives Campaign in pursuing licensure for Certified Professional Midwives in Ohio. Names and contact information for board members as well as their role within the organization may be found here. Starting tomorrow, the blog will help you “meet” a member of OFSB’s leadership team each week by featuring a short biography of each board member.