4 Reasons Midwives Are A Superb Women’s Health Solution

by JOY PULLMANN | THE FEDERALIST | AUGUST 5, 2015

4 Reasons Midwives Are A Superb Women’s Health Solution

Sovereign Solutions Editor’s Note:

I include this piece due to its excellent, in depth look into a TRULY free market, customer focused approach to healthcare that lowers cost as well as assures quality. The focus is on women’s health, which may be helpful to women, but the truly free market ideas talked about helps EVERYONE.

It is apparent that a soon-to-be mother’s health is quite vital, and this piece does address this by its very nature as well as showcase what I discovered to be most important for its inclusion here. 

We, as human beings, tend to forget that there is a great cost to NOT taking time to pursue, create, and sustain interpersonal relationships and true human care when it comes to purchasing services. It really transcends into something called community, and community, believe it or not, promotes quality and low cost. This knowledge is powerful in the hands of the consumer as well as the practitioner of care. This piece demonstrates that sacrificing these things at the altar of APPARENT and STATED efficiency and technological advancement and programmed health intervention is something to truly re-evaluate.

It may appear at times to be counter-intuitive, but if we really want high quality care, competitive and transparent pricing, and all of the reduction of stress and financial chaos that comes with it, we will have to take some steps backwards at times and SIMPLIFY. Sometimes it just so happens that what is simple may be what is most practical and effective. This piece advocates for women’s health but offers something for everyone. It is an important read. I hope you enjoy this article like I did.

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Midwives do a lot more nowadays than assist women in prenatal and post-natal care (although of course that’s their primary occupation).

Most of the half-dozen I’ve seen also offer well-woman care, such as pap smears, annual physicals, fertility management, hormone analysis, nutritional analysis and treatment, and mental-health referrals. How they are trained and licensed depends on state laws, but all are at least privately trained and licensed by national and international networks that ensure world-class standards of care. Some midwives are also RNs, and almost all also partner with RNs.

I see four major benefits to expanding opportunities for midwives to offer their unique style of woman-oriented healthcare. First, it’s low-cost. Second, it creates more flexible health-care arrangements for both providers and clients that greatly increase satisfaction and positive health outcomes. Third, it has the potential to “disrupt” the woman’s health-care industry and thus improve women’s health-care as a whole, with potential also to improve basic health care for everyone. Fourth, the ethos of midwifery is genuinely empowering and life-affirming, to women both individually and holistically, in the context of their whole families.

The major impediment to the innovative potential of midwifery is the medical establishment, which has obvious incentives to keep out low-cost, high-satisfaction competitors. Another is the fertility-industrial complex, which makes more money exploiting women than by actually meeting our real needs. Let’s talk about each of these items in turn.

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