From The Big Push for Midwives Campaign [10] 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 [11] 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 [11].
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.