Enhanced access to highly trained, nationally accredited, and licensed CNMs and CMs offers the US a viable solution to reducing maternal mortality, filling the workforce shortage gap, and increasing access to unbiased high-quality care. Yet, midwives remain mostly underutilized. Regulatory and legislative barriers that include physician supervision restrictions, prescriptive authority, and out-of-hospital birth legislation, among others, hamper access to midwifery care.
ACNM has an enormous potential to improve this country’s laws as they relate to midwifery, and by doing so, to improve the lives of mothers and infants in the US. Beyond lending its clinical excellence to women and infants through the practice of midwifery, CNMs and CMs must advocate for legislation that will fund accredited midwifery education programs, grow and diversify the maternity care workforce, enhance maternal health care provided by public health programs, and eliminate disparities in access to maternal health care.
The Health Policy Summit is designed to support the advancement of public policy impacting the midwifery profession and the people midwives serve. The meeting will provide midwives with an opportunity to learn how to effectively communicate the importance of proposed legislation impacting the midwifery profession including: Midwives for Maximizing Optimal Maternity Services Act (Midwives for MOMS Act), the Birth Access Benefitting Improved Essential Facility Services (BABIES) Act, the Improving Care and Access to Nurses Act and the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act.
Participants at this educational event will also learn about the health care policies impacting midwifery, and develop the skills needed to advocate for the profession in meetings with legislators during ACNM’s Hill Day and back home at your state capital.