While it is the perception of many people that midwifery is as extinct as the dinosaur, the fact is that this very old and very new profession is alive and flourishing. Midwives are working, legally and with credentials, in every state in the union, in hospitals, birthing centers, and in the home. Some of the qualities that were strongly identified by women with midwifery care in Kennedy's study were belief in the normalcy of birth, exceptional clinical skills and judgment, and commitment to the health of women and families.
Midwives consider themselves to be the experts in normal childbirth.
In Europe, midwives provide the majority of maternity care. In our country, midwives were common until the first decades of the twentieth century, when physicians decided that obstetrics should become a medical specialty and that birth should take place in the hospital. Consequently, even though there were no statistics to show that midwives' care resulted in worse outcomes, midwifery was made illegal in many states, and the number of practicing midwives dwindled. This situation endured until the sixties and seventies, when two very separate trends contributed to a renaissance of midwifery. Two types of professional midwives developed from these early prototypes.