An excerpt taken from the Commonwealth Fund’s article on disproportionately high Maternal Mortality Rate in the United States
Insights into the U.S. Maternal Mortality Crisis: An International Comparison
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2024/jun/insights-us-maternal-mortality-crisis-international-comparison
“Midwives are clinicians trained to provide a wide range of services — helping to manage normal pregnancies, assisting with childbirth, and providing care during the postpartum period, among others. In many countries, they are key providers of reproductive health care for women.
A recent study found that a midwife workforce, integrated into health care delivery, could provide 80 percent of essential maternal care around the world and potentially avert 41 percent of maternal deaths, 39 percent of neonatal deaths, and 26 percent of stillbirths.13
By placing a priority on natural reproduction processes and relationship-building, midwives also can help address the social needs of mother, baby, and family.14
Midwifery-led care models have been shown to provide care that is comparable to, or sometimes even better than, that provided by obstetrician-gynecologists, or ob-gyns.15 In the U.S., Canada, and Korea, ob-gyns outnumber midwives, while in most other countries midwives greatly outnumber ob-gyns.
The U.S. and Canada have the lowest overall supply of midwives and ob-gyns — 16 and 13 providers per thousand live births, respectively.
Nearly 7 million women in the U.S. currently live in counties where there are no hospitals or birth centers offering obstetric care and no obstetric providers, and the shortage is expected to only get worse in coming years.16
