The birth of the Global Midwifery Council was in June of 2010 at the Home Child/Midwifery Today Conference in Moscow, Russia. It was born to change the paradigm of birth around the world. At international conferences, Midwifery Today has learned enough about midwifery and birth around the world to realize that birth itself is in deep trouble. The Global Midwifery Council (GMC) is an organization born to help make long-term changes in how mothers and babies are treated and how midwifery is carried out. We have a mission to stop inappropriate over-medicalization in birth care!

Through international conferences and networking we have learned so many different ways to view and work with birth, such as using rebozo, which we learned from our Mexican sisters. It is necessary to turn from the over-medicalization of birth and return to a more organic, physiologic model. And the time is now.

We have a lot of work to do on many levels. Maternal death is not just a result of disease and malnutrition. I learned from my sister in Haiti recently that it is also caused by harmful cultural habits. Women there routinely douche after birth to “clean out their insides.” There is little clean water in Haiti. Women die from this. They also sit over boiling hot water after birth, often burning their labia. These habits are taught by their “aunties” as necessary, and cultural habits are hard to break. Many cultural habits are dangerous to mothers and babies and need to be stopped; some are likely harmless or even work on levels we do not understand yet and should not be changed; others are practices the world’s midwives can put into practice and begin sharing. Discernment is of utmost importance. In Western medical culture we have many dangerous practices, too, such as cutting women open to extract their babies for no reason at all!

Birth belongs to the mother and baby, but we want them both to live! Midwifery has always been God’s design to serve mother and baby, and we are always looking for better ways serve mother and baby in our work at Midwifery Today conferences.

The mission of the Global Midwifery Council all began with Midwifery Today receiving correspondence asking for help from many countries around the globe. Letters and e-mails came several times weekly and still continue unabated today. The time is now, and not because we are saying it! It is coming from mothers and midwives in many, many places. They are asking for help to change appalling birth practices, most of it abuse in hospitals.

The inception of the Global Midwifery Council (GMC) began with many e-mails sent back and forth to find a core group of dedicated and interested midwives. Many ideas of who we are and what we would do were written out. We worked on those ideas, and at the spring Midwifery Today conference in Eugene, Oregon, 2011, appropriately titled “Gentle Birth Is a Human Rights Issue,” Marion Toepke McLean, Mabel Dzata, Sister MorningStar, Vicki Penwell, Elizabeth Allemann, Carol Gautschi, Eneyda Spradlin-Ramos and I met for hours and hours of brainstorming, and came up with ideas, plans and notes.

Finding that we got the most done with face to face contact, we took those notes to Midwifery Today’s 2011 conference in Moscow, Russia, and worked on our foundational wording. Again, during many, many hours of meetings, Carol Gautschi, Gail Hart, Elena Plantino, Katerina Perkhova, Sister MorningStar and I fine-tuned our mission and goals (see sidebar).

Midwifery Today will be keeping the GMC’s “Situation Room” on our Web site. This made sense since we have been covering international midwifery and birth for the past 25 years. The International Alliance of Midwives’ (IAM) Goals and Beliefs, Definition of a Midwife and its statement on the Autonomy of the Midwifery Profession, plus the flags of different countries and information on those countries are all on the Midwifery Today Web site (http://www.midwiferytoday.com/iam/). The site has many articles and reports from Midwifery Today magazine, as well as issues of a separate newsletter dedicated to international midwifery. We also have 73 country contacts. A country contact is someone from a country who can disseminate information and keep us abreast of the midwifery and birth situation in their country. If you want to be a country contact, e-mail me at jan@midwiferytoday.com.

Let us all work together to create and promote plans of action to make these changes real now! Everybody’s energy and talents are necessary. There are many solutions to these problems; the goal is to make them happen and help others make them happen.

Each one teach one,

Jan Tritten Jan Tritten is the founder and editor-in-chief of Midwifery Today magazine and a midwife who was in active practice from 1977–1989. She became a midwife in 1977 after the powerful homebirth of one of her daughters. Her mission is to make loving midwifery care the norm for birthing women and their babies throughout the world. Meet Jan at our conferences around the world! [ PHOTO BY ANDREA NOLL ]   >  Editorials  Click here to read some of Jan’s Midwifery Today editorials.   >  Curriculum Vitae  1947 Born in Los Angeles, California. 1965 Graduated from Placer High School in Auburn, California. 1966 Trained for one year as a psychiatric technician. Courses included basic nursing, pharmacology, microbiology, anatomy and physiology, psychology. 1966–1971 Worked at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California as a psychiatric technician. 1968 Graduated from Sierra College with an Associate of Arts degree. 1970 Graduated with honors from Sacramento State College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Science. 1971 Earned Lifetime California teaching credential with fifth-year program from Sacramento State College. 1972 First daughter born in a hospital. It changed my life forever. It was an unsatisfactory birth experience, but I had a wonderful postpartum experience with 2-1/2 years of breastfeeding. 1976 Second daughter born. She was born at home with a doctor who talked me into a homebirth. The difference between the two births sent me on a path to do something to help women have positive birth experiences. 1976 Began training as a midwife. Because I was raising young children and running a business, and because there were no CNM schools in my area, becoming a CNM was not within my reach. 1977 Began attending births with the Birth Co-op in Eugene while organizing courses in our community taught by CNMs, physicians, nutritionists, etc. 1978 Began a midwifery practice, New Life Care, with a partner, Chris Howard, and apprentice Monika Dunsmore. 1979 Son born at home. 1980 Did a one-year program with Marion Toepke McLean, CNM. Four of us completed the program, which was modeled after CNM curriculum at that time. She took a year off from her practice to teach us and to go to our births with us. 1982 First group of midwives certified by the Oregon Midwives Council. Our board was composed of CNMs and physicians. 1986 Slowed down practice and started Midwifery Today magazine.

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