Letter: Midwives work well with doctors when lawyers stay out

Thursday, June 17, 1999 | 9:48 a.m.

Just to clear up some misunderstandings, the practice of midwifery has nothing to do with the practice of medicine.

Pregnancy is not a medical condition, and birth is not a medical event. Birth is as safe as life itself.

Women birthing babies have (since the dawn of time) needed loving, experienced support to guide them safely through labor and birth.

Obstetricians and neonatalogists should be heroes. They have dedicated their lives to learning how to save mothers and babies through heroic measures in those rare times when nature fails.

Midwives are trained to enhance and protect nature; doctors are trained to find and then fix dysfunction and disease.

Ideally, midwives and doctors would work together, as they do in all of the countries where birth is the safest.

Midwives aren't intruding into the arena of the obstetricians -- if anything it is the other way around.

And if having a college degree and a license insured safety and good outcomes, then what is the malpractice insurance for, and why are there so many desperately sick babies in the NICUs?

NICUs are not filled with babies from midwives and that is why when one of our babies does go there it is such spectacular news.

Lawyers have done more to make birth unsafe and unsatisfying than any other single issue.

Regardless of where or with whom mothers chose to birth their babies, they should get referrals and references, get to know their practitioner, and choose one who will honor the body, mind and spirit.

And then please leave the lawyers out of it. Let birth and life and death be the mysterious acts of God they are.

Only then will all practitioners feel free enough to trust mothers to birth their babies from the heart.

CORRINE FLATT Midwife