Nurse Midwifery Week is Oct 7-11. Certified nurse midwives and their patients and families are celebrating all over the country the increasing popularity of this birth choice.

In the last 20 years births with nurse midwives have risen from 1 percent to 10 percent nationwide and is approaching 15 percent in Maine. There are now 10,000 certified nurse midwives in the country and 99 percent of them attend women in the hospital or birthing center. Less than 1 percent do home births.

Certified nurse midwives are trained as nurses first and over two-thirds of them have master’s degrees. A certified nurse midwife degree is a one- to two-year program beyond a nursing degree. A woman might choose to see a certified nurse midwife for all of her prenatal care if she is looking for a more personalized touch and extra time in her prenatal visits. The nurse midwife also spends most of the time of labor in the hospital with her patient providing support with a commitment toward the natural birthing

process. It has been shown that this alone decreases the chances of a Caesarean birth.

Comfort measures such as music, aromatherapy, massage, water, position changes, birthing balls and hypnotherapy are encouraged. An epidural is an option, used less frequently due to the success of these alternatives. Routine continuous monitoring, IV’s, episiotomies, and inductions are limited to necessity. Trust in one’s body to birth naturally makes a huge difference in outcomes. A backup physician is always immediately available if needed and nurse midwives have equally safe outcome statistics as physicians.

Important to many women in a private midwifery practice is the fact that she will be guaranteed to have a close, trusting relationship with her care provider who is on call all the time for her birth. Insurance companies provide equal coverage of certified nurse midwife services or a physician’s care. Some nurse midwives work within a physician’s practice and see patients in rotating visits with the physician.

The increase in numbers of women seeing nurse midwives for their pregnancy care and deliveries has a great deal to do with the satisfaction of women with this alternative and their eagerness to spread the word of their experience to their friends. To celebrate this week nurse midwives ask their patients to tell another of their experience in choosing this kind of care.

Debbie Hill Hunter, CNM has been in her own private practice in the Bangor area for more than 20 years with Parker Harris, M.D. She limits her patient numbers in order to spend time with them and is on call all the time for her births at Eastern Maine Medical Center. Since the retirement of Dr. Harris, her backup is now Dr. Robert Grover and she practices out of his office in the Webber Building at EMMC.