Midwifery Important to Amish Community
Your November 14 story entitled “UH Physician Voices Concerns on Amish Care Desert” was a hodge-podge story of misinformation and inaccurate hearsay. Your story lacked the facts regarding traditional midwifery care that has been important to the Amish community for many decades.
The traditional midwives of Middlefield Midwifery are highly trained/skilled professionals providing safe, satisfying and personal care in home settings and religious exempt birth centers in NE Ohio and around our state.
Traditional midwives follow the nationally recognized Midwives Model of Care® and are legal, legitimate practitioners well-known in the communities they serve. They serve low-risk women and transfer care to medical providers when situations arise outside of their scope of practice.
The defamation of character of midwives without directly speaking to an actual midwife was highly disrespectful of the families who value their care and make the educated choice to receive traditional midwifery care over medical care.
With regard to your reporting of the recent politics of a long-standing local Amish birth center, the simple truth is that medical providers of that facility lost sight of the community’s preference for the traditional midwifery care which they had benefitted from for six years. The discontinuing of traditional midwifery care in that facility created much discourse and unhappiness in the Amish community.
Due to the continued desire for traditional midwifery care, members of the Amish community gathered and elected a board to establish a new religious-exempt center through the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) program created in 2006 to better meet the birthing needs of Amish families throughout Ohio. Religious exempt birth centers are legal, legitimate birth centers giving Amish communities the ability to establish quality care facilities approved by the ODH.
We appreciate the opportunity to add clarity to this issue.
Middlefield Midwifery
Pamela D. Kolanz, DEM
Monica S. Honeycutt, DEM
Jessica Brown, CPM
