You clearly have an international perspective on midwifery. From that perspective, what do you see about the current situation of midwifery in the UK?
I've been watching you all here for about twenty years. Morale was very high twenty years ago, you were getting some things done, there was a lot of excitement. Then there was excitement about Changing Childbirth, the Winterton Report, having a Member of Parliament, Audrey Wise, who was really on your side. I know it had to be a huge loss, her recent death.
I think also I might have an idea of what would help you get back up on your feet again, and that would be to look at New Zealand. That helped me, I've been watching them for twenty years too and they are way ahead of where they were twenty years ago. They're independent now, and that's something that midwives in all countries should aspire to. They've actually pulled it off. They got their early inspiration from a US organisation called NAPSAC (National Association of Parents and Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbearing). They still publish good work (see
www.napsac.org).
Joan Donnelly - the key figure in the early days who midwifed the midwifery movement in New Zealand - borrowed a lot of stuff from NAPSAC. When she and only two other midwives attended all of the home births in the country, they knew that they needed some soil to grow, and saw that as the home birth mothers. So they got those mothers involved and they got them passionate. Joan Donnelly has got a brilliant strategic mind, she's a first-class politician and also a great midwife. She had the loyalty of the women, understood the midwives' needs and yet she's also a broad thinker, quite a visionary. She brought those mothers and midwives together, they had home birth associations all over New Zealand before they had the New Zealand College of Midwives, they only formed that around 1990.
The New Zealand midwives were able to win their autonomy with doing political work, writing letters to the media, witty letters, they took on all these fights and won so much, they even had the cartoonists on their side, they had their own cartoonist doing work. They won their independence, their autonony, got out from under nursing around 1990. Now they've had ten years to show that, because of doing this, their perinatal mortality went down. It's hard to counter that argument.