The birthing industry is a lucrative business. Hospitals make thousands from women who come through their doors to do something they were created to do: birth. As soon as a woman in labor enters the hospital’s double doors, she is sent to a triage room where she is hooked up to a machine to track her contractions, marking the beginning of her hospital bill.

Once the labor and delivery nurse deems her “ready,” the woman gets hooked up to an IV, nurses come in and out of the room, the woman gets offered pain medication, and finally the obstetrician comes to the room to deliver the baby only to tell the woman that she is taking too long and off to the operating room they go to deliver the baby through a cesarean section. After the baby is born, nurses continue to come in and out of the room to weigh the baby as the tired mother can barely make out what is happening. All she can think of is how tired she is and how she just wants to be left alone with her baby.

This birthing experience has become the norm for new mothers. New mothers often go into pregnancy and delivery without knowing much because they believe that the “experts” have her and her baby’s interests at heart. Unfortunately, this is not always true. The “experts” have highly medicalized a beautiful, wonderful, and natural process of bringing new life into the world. Birthing has become a medical condition when in fact it is natural, and women have been birthing since the beginning of time.

The PBS series Call the Midwives blog describes characteristics of a medicalized birth as:

• Depersonalized and fragmented care
  
• Mother and baby are seen as separate
  
• Mistrust in normal physiology
  
• Environment tends to be designed for the clinicians/interventions/and risk assessment
  
• And often an environment where we see a limitation and mistrust of midwifery

It is important that laboring women know they have rights and that they have autonomy. A woman must know that even during her intense delivery, she can consent to what happens to her body. A laboring woman can reject what the nurses may be wanting her to do. It is important that women know that there are other ways to deliver her baby.

The practice of midwifery has been around for ages. They provide personalized care for pregnant women throughout the pregnancy and postpartum. Midwives are truly experts in their field because caring for a pregnant mother and delivering babies is all they do. Midwives practice their craft at birthing centers, privately, and in hospitals as well.

Under the care of a midwife, a woman can expect to be respected, educated, and loved as her baby develops in utero. Opting for a home birth or a birthing center is often more cost effective as well. Women who opt for midwives often cite positive birthing experiences before and after birth. A positive from the COVID scare was that mothers began searching for alternatives to hospitals. It is time to make midwifery great again.