Feeling the pressure from the patriarical medical model

Today my midwifery partners and I were essentially told to stop practicing as midwives and adopt the medical model for managing obstetric patients, with no regard to their risk factors, history or desires. This goes fundamentally against everything I feel and strive to achieve in my career! I feel like I am in a bad dream that keeps getting worse every passing moment.

I've heard all my life about women's rights, the feminist movement, and the inequality between men and women, but I've never considered myself a feminist. I learned in school all about the medical model and how obstetricians, primarily males, have shaped the world of maternity care and have dramatically reduced women's options and voices in their own care. I never thought I'd one day work in an environment that would both fuel the fire of feminism inside me and also continuously try and restrict and remove the choices and rights of the women I am serving in my career. I honestly feel like we are going backward instead of forward in our care for women.

It seems that our physicians are moving more and more towards their comfort zone of intense medical managment when they say again and again how impressed they are with the outcomes we midwives have achieved with our patient population. Despite the fact that we work in a moderately high risk population, we consistantly have cesarean rates that are well below the national average, and almost always below the WHO recommendations. We strive daily to educate, empower and protect the women in our practice, and now we are being told to disregard all our instincts, all our education, training and philosophy of midwifery care to make our doctors happy. And why? Because they are afraid of lawsuits. That's what it ultimately boils down to, and they will admit that fact. But, they don't care, and they will also admit that.

One day, I will either work for a practice in which the physicians are 100% midwifery friendly and supportive, or I will work for a midwifery practice. I honestly can't wait!!