Licensed Midwives Matter

Licensed Midwives are autonomous maternity care providers for women experiencing normal, healthy pregnancies. Florida Licensed Midwives are direct-entry midwives. A direct-entry midwife receives specialized training and education in the academics and skills specific to midwifery practice. Previous education or licensure in another health care field or profession, such as nursing, is not required for admission into a direct-entry midwifery education program.

Throughout Europe and the rest of the world as well as in Florida and many other states, midwifery is a profession that is separate yet complimentary to nursing, obstetrics, and all other health care professions. Although many direct-entry midwives may hold degrees and certifications in other disciplines, this is not mandatory. All skills necessary to practice midwifery are included into Florida midwifery educational programs and consist of, but are not limited to, nursing, pharmacology, alternative medicine, obstetrics, gynecology, fetology, embryology, genetics, lab and diagnostics and many other disciplines. Clinical internships are mandatory and integrated into the direct-entry midwifery educational programs and involve home birth, birth center, and hospital clinical experiences.

Benefits of Licensed Midwifery care:

• LMs are experts in low-risk and healthy

• LMs are autonomous practitioners; they are supervised by Florida law, not by physicians. Therefore, they may provide more flexible childbirth options.

Midwives practicing in Florida are offering care in both urban and rural areas, and to all socioeconomic groups. The cost of a midwife-assisted birth is significantly less than that of hospital birth, and numerous scientific studies have shown midwifery care and home birth to be at least as safe as physician-assisted hospital births for the vast majority of mothers and babies. Currently birth center and home birth midwifery care is readily available to the women and families of Florida.

The access to midwifery care which Florida's residents enjoy is largely due to political organizing and advocacy in the 1980's and early 1990's - including crucial grassroots efforts by the Midwives Association of Florida and the Florida Friends of Midwives. Consumers and other advocates for expanding availability to midwifery care lobbied our state government and succeeded in getting family-friendly laws passed in Florida.