Those of you that were working at our downtown campus last Wednesday afternoon may have seen the 100 or so folks carrying placards in front of our 150 Building.  They were asking us to make it easier to have a home-birth in AZ.  How can we do that, you ask? 

Many of you probably didn’t know that we license the 50 or so Midwives that practice in Arizona.  Our licensing rules for Midwives were last revised in the mid 1990’s, our rules are out of date, and the application is too complicated.  I met with 4 of the community folks upstairs during the demonstration- and we had a productive discussion.  Basically- they asked us to consider revising our Midwife licensing rules to simplify the application process and consider revising their scope of practice.  We talked during our meeting about the rulemaking process (both exempt and regular), gave them a realistic forecast of how quickly we could revise the rules using each approach, and set up a dialog so we could come up with a solution together. 

Coincidently- there was a study published in the British Medical Journal this week regarding the safety etc. of home births. The study basically suggests that there’s little difference in complications among the babies of women with low-risk pregnancies who delivered in hospitals vs. those who gave birth at home with a midwife.  Of course- the article is more complicated than that- so visit the journal article for more info…