Even though I respect my fellow midwives who are medically trained, I find their approach to birth different than my own. In watching how the medical world viewed birth there was always an element of fear evident in their practice. I continued to view pregnancy and birth as a healthy state and always questioned what I was seeing in the care of women and their babies. Because of this my choices in education are based in the belief that I could learn better in an apprenticeship viewing homebirths rather than interventive births in a hospital. CPM certification, I believe, is the best way to connect ALL midwives and bring us to a common ground for the betterment of birth in our country.
CM seems to be a negative distraction in the goal of having a midwife for every mother.
There is an exclusion of a very important model in midwifery care and I find this to be very wrong. Our real goal to provide this kind of care would best be served by agreeing that route of education is secondary to the message we are trying to get across to our country in terms of midwifery being BEST for the childbearing woman. At the same time I would not shut the door on midwives who came through nursing. We need to respect our diversity while honoring our profession. While I'm in accord with much of Diane's thoughtful essay, I do not see the CPM certification as being the unifying gesture.