November 15th in Akron, the Akron Birth Network, the Ohio Midwives Alliance, and Ohio Families for Safe Birth are pleased to bring you a special pre-release showing of Pregnant in America, a full month before it is released to the general public.

The showing will be followed by a community conversation about home birth, midwifery, and regulation. Susan Hodges, president of Citizens for Midwifery, will be joining us. Jane Peterson, president of the Wisconsin Midwives Guild and a chief orchestrator of Wisconsin’s recent successful legislative effort, will also be present “babies permitting.”

More details to follow soon!

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!

In Australia, the government is considering overhauls to their health care system, including improving maternity services by giving midwives a greater role and more autonomy. (Australian midwife Lisa Barrett has been covering this process on her blog.) Today, the Sydney Morning Herald published this delightful article about the benefits of midwifery care.

“Women who are cared for by midwives rather than GPs or obstetricians are less likely to lose their babies within the first six months of their pregnancies, an international review of maternity services has found. …

“The analysis, which is the largest undertaken in the world, also found that women in midwife-led models of care were less likely to be admitted to hospital during pregnancy, have instrumental deliveries, episiotomies or require analgesia and were more likely to have spontaneous vaginal births, feel in control during labour and better able to initiate breastfeeding.”

More details about this analysis can be found at the Cochrane Collaboration website. The study authors’ conclusion: “All women should be offered midwife-led models of care and women should be encouraged to ask for this option.”

Adrianna Belle Wilson, 8 lbs 12 oz and 19.25 in, was born under water on March 3, 2006 to parents, Scott and Summer Wilson. The birth was attended by a direct-entry midwife.  The expression on Summer’s face is pure elation after hours of laboring with a posterior baby who would only turn with the help of her midwife’s hands.  Scott cried tears of joy and relief when his first baby finally came into the world.

The Sunday Photo Album is a regular feature of the Safe Birth Blog. If you would like to submit a picture, please email soracolvin@gmail.com.

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.

From this Women’s E-News article (part of a series on black maternal health) come these sobering statistics:

“African American women’s rates for dying during pregnancy, labor and immediately after giving birth are more than triple the national rate of maternal mortality. Roughly 31.7 black maternal deaths occur per 100,000 live births in comparison to 12.4 maternal death per all 100,000 births in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

The article also addresses the AMA’s vendetta against home birth and the Big Push for Midwives:

“Certified professional midwives are a critical component to meet the growing maternal health needs in the black community,” said [certified midwife Shafia] Monroe, noting that every sort of midwife is needed to reduce maternal morality rates among African American women.

The Midwives Model of Care, which has been shown to have excellent results in high-social-risk populations, could be a critical key to addressing the deplorable racial disparities in maternal / child health. The AMA’s and ACOG’s push to keep Certified professional midwives unlicensed and underground contributes to the problem.