Profits versus midwives

As Kentucky families desperately seek safer, more cost-effective maternity care options, the Kentucky Hospital Association and Kentucky Medical Association seek to block our options.

Senate Bill 85, a bill to license certified professional midwives, allows nationally credentialed and trained midwives to be licensed by the state to serve healthy, low-risk women in out-of-hospital settings.

As the bill winds through the legislative process with wide bipartisan support, these organizations representing for-profit institutions blatantly misrepresent the bill’s content and intent.

In publications to their members and our legislators, they smear professional midwives by calling them untrained and uneducated, and they insult the hundreds of families supporting this bill by claiming that we need more regulation from the government around private family health-care decisions.

In fact, the entire purpose of the bill is to establish training and credentialing requirements for Kentucky midwives, making birth safer, healthier and less expensive for families who choose this option.

These organizations are clinging to a monopoly on maternity care that has produced one of the nation’s worst C-section rates, widespread mandatory surgery policies for women who have had C-sections, and C-section rates in individual hospitals of more than 50 percent.

Families, rather than for-profit institutions, should decide what is safest and best for them.

This story was originally published March 11, 2016 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Profits versus midwives."