The Big Push for Midwives Campaign

The Elevate Prize funding and support would advance my long-time work through The Big Push for Midwives Campaign to build back midwifery and community birth in the U.S. and increase access to more birth options, Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs), and out-of-hospital birth and maternity care. In U.S. states and territories where CPMs are not legally authorized to practice, they are at risk of criminal prosecution for practicing medicine or nursing without a license, which drives the practice of midwifery underground, creating barriers to access for women seeking maternity care.

The Elevate Prize funding and support would advance my newly created work through the Where’s My Midwife? initiative, which includes Where's My Midwife? A Podcast to share new voices and stories in the movement to make way for midwives and that I cohost with Kirsti Kreutzer. In addition, I could do so much to advance the Where’s My Midwife? Crowdmap, which provides visibility on where out-of-hospital midwifery care may be available to pregnant people. The Elevate Prize funding and support would allow me to co-create new podcast episodes and to pilot new projects with states as they work to identify and map more community birth assets. 

I am a writer, editor, strategist, facilitator, innovator, connector, independent thinker, multiple-points-of-view perceiver, information synthesizer, advocate and public affairs expert. I've had my own consultancy, Red Quill Communications, Inc. since 2000 through which I provide top-notch professional communications and operations services, valuable creativity, and critical insight to help my clients actualize goals and objectives, communicate key messages, and manifest new success.

My primary objective is to stay curious and keep learning, all the while applying my deep expertise and successful background in professional communications and operations services to advance social entrepreneurial endeavors, solutions-based enterprises, and movements for change.

I co-founded The Big Push for Midwives Campaign, a national mutual-aid coalition of state midwife societies and state consumer advocates who have been pushing for decades, even before our work and this movement took the name The Big Push for Midwives Campaign.

My future goals are to continue to advance the work of grassroots advocates who are providing the public education and advocacy to improve access to community midwives and birth centers, and also creating a public dialogue about midwifery and birth, consisting of public information, growing media coverage, and studies and reports.

On this International Day of the Midwife on May 5, 2021, tens of thousands of families are joining the Big Push for Midwives Campaign to ask loudly, “Where’s My Midwife?” To help answer this question, I led and launched the Where’s My Midwife? initiative to help build back midwifery and community birth in the U.S. 

When I say "build back midwifery and community birth," it is important to recognize the truth of how midwives have always been with us across all of human history. It is also essential to unflinchingly examine how it is only in the last 120 years or so that midwives have been pushed back, pushed out, and pushed down by Big Medicine in the U.S. There are many strong words to describe the actions taken by the AMA in the U.S. to eliminate midwives at the turn of the last century, and more words and phrases to call out the ongoing attempts by organized medicine to restrict and confine midwifery and community birth to this very day. If you ask me, some of those descriptive words include tragic outcomes for women, arrogant and unchecked medical hubris, and deliberate restraint of trade by physician competitors.

The Where’s My Midwife? Crowdmap launched in April 2020 to connect midwives trained in out-of-hospital birth with pregnant people wishing to give birth in community (out-of-hospital settings), such as private homes and freestanding birth centers. Where's My Midwife? A Podcast tells the stories of midwives and the families who love the excellent maternity care their midwives provide in communities across the nation. The trailer and first three episodes of the new long-format podcast were released in April 2021.

My work is unique and disruptive because we support grassroots advocates who fight anti-midwife policies that are designed to deter midwives, limit their scope of practice, and prevent licensure, all of which are out-of-step and dangerously discordant today in the presence of a dire U.S. maternal mortality crisis. We serve state midwife societies and state consumer advocates to help them persist in their statewide licensing campaigns.

Attempts to weaken and undermine midwives fly in the face of scientific evidence and increasingly urgent recommendations for midwives to be regulated through licensure, fully integrated into the Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (RMNCH) Continuum of Care in communities, and covered in public and private insurance plans in every state and territory.

The Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) credential was developed in the late 1980s and first issued in 1994 by the North American Registry of Midwives (NARM) to midwives with specialized training and expertise in providing safe, skilled maternity care in community birth settings. CPMs are the only U.S. midwives whose educational standards require them to undergo specialized clinical training in out-of-hospital settings as a condition of national certification. 

Many CPMs have encountered discrimination or exclusion from licensure despite being qualified by their training and education. In U.S. states and territories where CPMs are not legally authorized to practice, they're at risk of criminal prosecution for practicing medicine or nursing without a license, which drives the practice of midwifery underground, creating barriers to access for women seeking maternity care.

Grow the Crowdmap. A complete directory of U.S. midwives does not exist, but the established Big Push community networks links Midwives with pregnant people.

Grow the Podcast. Storytelling is the cornerstone to increasing access to excellent, evidence-based maternity care in out-of-hospital settings. Personal stories build empathy, compassion and help tell a broad story with a variety of voices. We feature midwives, parents, families, educators and researchers, health professionals, grassroots activists and community members.