International Cesarean Awareness Network

The Utah Legislators have a bill before them proposed by Senator Dayton and the Utah Medical Association.  This is a pretty good synopsis by my friend Sara Forsberg, Director Utah Birth Network:

Midwives never wanted to be licensed by the state. They were being
prosecuted and one midwife was told she had to choose between her LDS
temple recommend or her midwifery practice (they were accused of
practicing medicine without a license - a felony in Utah). She left
her midwifery practice and pursued the bill to legalize midwifery in
Utah. It would have been lovely to have stayed under the radar - had
they not been threatened with jail time and loss of religious
privileges.

Sen. Dayton’s comments about not adhering to regulations is totally
false. Midwives have a long and proven track record and were being
monitored and have much better outcomes than physicians in Utah (this
is true over the whole world actually). She and the UMedA are using
scare tactics and false information (attributing deaths and other
catastrophes to midwives - totally unfounded which you can see in
DOPL’s stats).

The bill affects ALL midwives - licensed and unlicensed. They already
have rules and regulations in place and DOPL (dept of occupational and
professional licensing) is keeping track of the midwives and
maintaining statistics and outcomes and they are excellent.

The biggest problem with the bill being passed out of the senate was
that the senators were under the mistaken impression that this was a
"compromise" bill between the Utah Medical Association (which is the
group behind the bill) and the LDEM’s (licensed direct entry
midwives). At the Senate committee meeting the UMedA was admonished to stop wasting everyone’s time and work something out with the midwives.
They met and after a number of hours they agreed on many points. The
UMedA told them they would draft the bill and have the LDEM’s review
it before they submitted it to the Senate. Instead they wrote their
own new bill that effectively risks out at least 96% of all clients.
They snuck the bill into the Senate without notifying the midwives.

This bill removes parents rights that have been guaranteed elsewhere
in statute. If this bill passes it will mean that a group of surgeons
that don’t understand normal or natural birth have forced women into
medically managed hospitals - many of them forced into surgery.

House Representative Biskupski is proposing a substitute bill. This is the one we want to support. If any of you live in Utah, please contact your House Representative. Their contact information is here:  http://le.utah.gov/house/index.htm. There are midwives and moms at the Utah State Capital every day from 10 to 12 and 2 to 4. If you could come talk to your House Rep, that would be great.