[6] Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNMs) are able to practice in all settings, including hospitals, birth centers, and private homes.
Proponents of midwives have been trying to introduce a bill to change the law for the past nine years when it was finally made it out of committee in 2011.
[8] Recently in Texas, a group of midwives working on the U.S.-Mexican border have been found guilty of selling false birth certificates.
For reasons of culture, language, and cost, midwives did not completely disappear despite the rise in physician-attended births at the turn of the twentieth century.
[10] In the early 1900s, traditional midwives came under fire in what has been called the “midwife problem” when they became scapegoats for American's high infant mortality rate.
[11] These trends spread from the northeast across the United States such that midwives no longer attended the majority of births in the country by the 1930s.
[4][11] While some public health officials, pediatricians, and social workers wanted to eliminate midwifery, others did not think this would solve the problem.
Additionally, the deliveries attended by midwives trained by Bellevue had lower maternal and infant mortality rates than citywide statistics.
[11] In a paper presented to the National Organization for Public Health Nursing in 1914, Dr. Frederick J. Taussing wrote that “the nurse midwife will […] prove to be the most sympathetic, the most economical, and the most efficient agent in the case of normal confinement.”[11] In the next couple of decades, there were several short-lived attempts to create nurse-midwifery training, including the Maternity Center Association (MCA) in New York City in 1923 and the Manhattan Midwifery School in 1925.
[11] The mission of FNS was to provide nurse midwife care for mothers and infants who live in an isolated area without access to healthcare.
Indeed, the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky where FNS was located had some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the nation.
Statistics on the maternal mortality rate of FNS is significantly lower compared to state- and nationwide data.
The two goals of the Lobenstein School were to “1) supervise and teach untrained midwives and 2) bring skilled maternity care […] to women in remote rural areas.”[11] The MCA modeled its midwifery curriculum after European, particularly British examples.
Secondly, around the same time in 1931, MCA established the Lobenstine Midwifery Clinic, which served predominately poor African Americans or Puerto Ricans in Harlem who needed the services.
[11] Despite the success of these early efforts to establish professional status of midwives, midwifery failed to make a significant comeback.
ACNM was later renamed to the American College of Nurse-Midwives in 1969 and continues to establish legal status and to set standards for the training and regulation of midwives.