How to Become a Midwife

You want to be a midwife, but what kind of midwife? What training options would be best for you? Paths to Becoming a Midwife will help you make sense of the various options available.

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Pathswas designed to help you discover what kind of midwife you should be and what training optons are best for you. Midwifery Today Number 78 has a listing of direct entry programs available around the US, as well as articles on traditional midwifery, nurse-midwifery, apprenticeship, and direct entry midwifery.

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If you're thinking about becoming a midwife this package will give you a good start. It includes includes a one-year subscription to Midwifery Today magazine, the book, Paths to Becoming a Midwife: Getting an Education and four audio tapes.

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The midwife of the 1970s was aspiring toward her midwifery: It was a goal, an ideal. She could not, as her sister/foremother of the 1800s could, take midwifery for granted. For an earlier midwife, the practice of midwifery was important, valued and respected, but also a part of ordinary life. Of course there were midwives, and of course what midwives did was practice midwifery. The work needed to be done, and someone would have to do it, such as, for instance, cobblers, the people who made shoes. That is not to say the work wasn't much appreciated, and not to say better cobblers weren't much in demand, but one wouldn't think to venerate grand cobblers or hold up the ideals of cobbling.

Because midwifery was so deeply damaged, so all but completely destroyed in the years that separate the two midwives on my T-shirt, it can no longer be taken for granted. Midwifery came to be something more than the people who practice it-it came to be something of an ideal, a goal, a model to which one could aspire. The distinction arose between midwifery as an occupation or a practice, as something one does, and midwifery as a model. I am the person who first wrote about the distinction between a "medical model" and a "midwifery model" of pregnancy and childbirth. When Marsden Wagner pointed out to me that I was the first person who made this distinction, I was surprised-hadn't we always known this?

From The Daughters of Time on the Paths to Midwifery - by Barbara Katz Rothman, PhD. This article was originally written for the book Paths to Becoming a Midwife: Getting an Education . It also appeared in Midwifery Today Issue 49, Spring 1999.

To educate sensitive and astute midwives we must "first do no harm." Education draws out what already exists in the student. We need to make sure that those who become midwives are truly dedicated and not just looking for a way to earn a living. Students should not have to abuse women with dangerous testing, hospital routines or unnecessary and dangerous interventions. This usually is not an issue for direct entry students, who do not work where those routines are thrust on motherbaby. Nurse-midwife students need to be more diligent in choosing a program; some excellent ones are available. I recommend asking students and graduates of the school about their experiences.

From Aspiring and Student Midwives Are Our Hope for the Future - by Jan Tritten. This editorial originally appeared in Midwifery Today, Issue 78, Summer 2006