CNMA LOBBY DAY!

Calling all California Certified Nurse-Midwives and Allies! Please register for our most important Lobby Day yet! 

WHEN: April 15, 2020 8am-5pm,  

WHERE: Sacramento. More information forthcoming

WHY: The California Nurse-Midwives Association and Black Women for Wellness, a Los Angeles based advocacy organization, have announced the introduction of Senate Bill 1237 (Dodd/Burke) which aims to improve access to high-quality, high-value maternity care across California, and is being put forward as a strategy to counter the obstetrician workforce crisis, which is projected to be at a critical low in some counties by the year 2025, and to curb disparities in outcomes for Black women and infants. Despite significantly reducing the maternal mortality rate in California, experts from the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative report that Black women in California still die at a rate that is 3-4 times higher than White women during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. Furthermore, babies born to black women were more than three times as likely to die of a preterm birth-related issue as babies born to white women in 2017. National and international organizations including the March of Dimes and the World Health Organization have stated that improved access to midwives, and scaling up of the profession, is one of the necessary and innovative strategies to reduce and eventually eliminate racial disparities in maternal and infant outcomes.  

California is different from other states in that nurse-midwives already do 50,000 births a year and therefore have a real potential to be force of change for the maternity care crisis in the state.  Despite being on the leading edge of health care innovation, California lags behind all other Western states in integrating nurse-midwifery, and is one of only 4 states that still requires nurse-midwives to have physician permission to practice. This creates significant barriers to scaling up the profession, as it requires nurse-midwives to find and then sustain a physician supervisor. Forty-six other states have removed this requirement. States that have removed this requirement and allowed autonomous practice within a more integrated, collaborative model of care delivery between physicians and midwives show: a greater proportion of rural hospitals with midwives attending births, significantly higher rates of spontaneous vaginal delivery, vaginal birth after cesarean, and breastfeeding, and significantly lower rates of cesarean, preterm birth, low birth weight infants, and neonatal death.

This bill is being introduced during the World Health Organization’s Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, and on the heels of recent statements by leading patient advocacy organizations,  including the March of Dimes, California Health Care Foundation, and the Pacific Business Group on Health, all calling for the immediate reduction in regulatory barriers to nurse-midwifery practice and greater investment in the nurse-midwifery workforce in California.