From The Big Push for Midwives Campaign comes a huge plea:

We are down to the wire days left before the final deadline for including Certified Professional Midwives in the Senate health reform bill!

We need everyone to CALL or FAX your TWO U.S. SENATORS today!

Please ask them to take the lead in sponsoring an amendment to the Senate health bill to provide Medicaid payment of Certified Professional Midwife services. 

With the state of health care as it is, especially for women, it is more critical than ever that health care reform measures address the many ways to remedy these challenges. Women in the United States are still dying (at rates higher than almost any other developed nation in the world) during pregnancy and childbirth from preventable conditions. African American women die during childbirth almost 3-4 times more often than White women, in the U.S. We also know that the C-section rate in this country has skyrocketed so that one out of every 3 women undergo major surgery during chidlbirth in this country. 

I mention these statistics because ensuring greater access to certified professional midwives (CPMs) is one way to address some of the distressing challenges facing pregnant and birthing women in this country. The Big Push, specifically, is asking for the Senate bill to include an amendment that would ensure CPMs are covered under Medicaid; this would encourage a uniform certification process for midwives in this country as well as make homebirth and CPM facilitated birth accessible to all women – not just those who can afford to pay for these services out-of-pocket. 

So, from The Big Push:

Ask that your Senator take the lead in sponsoring an amendment to provide Medicaid payment for the services of Certified Professional Midwives, who are the only type of midwife in the U.S. with specialized training in out-of-hospital maternity care.

To find your Senators and their contact information, click here.

Need talking points? You can use these from The Big Push for Midwives!

• Pregnant women are being denied access to maternity care
  thanks to an oversight in Medicaid law that denies low-income women who seek
  out-of-hospital maternity care access to Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs)
  in all but 11 states.

 

• Because of this gap in Medicaid law, thousands of women in
  states across the country unable to utilize the services of providers with a
  proven record of improving outcomes.

 

• Denying pregnant women access to Certified Professional
  Midwives saddles our health care system with hundreds of millions of dollars in
  additional costs each year.

 

• Across the country in rural and urban communities, Certified
  Professional Midwives are already meeting the needs of pregnant women and their
  infants who have nowhere else to go at a time when many other maternity care
  providers have abandoned these communities to practice in more affluent suburbs
  and exurbs.

 

• Demand for access to out-of-hospital birth under the care of
  Certified Professional Midwives — who are specially trained to provide it —
  has increased 27% since 1996.

 

• Research consistently shows that low-risk women who plan
  out-of-hospital births under the care of Certified Professional Midwives
  experience outcomes equal to low-risk women who give birth in the hospital, but
  with far fewer costly and preventable interventions, including a five-fold
  decrease in cesarean surgery.

 

• Certified Professional Midwives have a proven history of
  reducing low birth weight and preterm birth, the main causes of neonatal death
  in the United States and two of the primary contributing factors to racial and
  ethnic disparities in birth outcomes, as well as to the costs associated with
  long-term care.