Rebecca advocates to improve maternity care, especially access to Certified Professional Midwives, as a basic human right for women as the New Media Director for The Big Push for Midwives Campaign. She will complete her JD in May 2010 at the University of Maryland School of Law, and holds an MPH from the University of Virginia. She is the founder of the Maryland Law Students for Reproductive Justice and previously worked with the human rights and law team at the United Nations Joint Programme for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in Geneva, Switzerland. She has experience in HIV/AIDS research, bioethics research, grant writing, and early childhood special education.
Women want out-of-hospital maternity care, and they deserve legal access to it. Yet in 23 states and Washington D.C., Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) face prosecution for serving women who do not want to give birth in a hospital.
Last week, a firestorm erupted in the birth and reproductive justice advocacy world over a statement generated by the NIH Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) Consensus Development panel implying that in some circumstances a pregnant woman cannot refuse cesarean surgery.
Whether in regard to access to VBAC or to abortion, legislators, like physicians, have an ethical and professional duty to protect public health and respect women’s rights, not to bow to lobbies who wish to own them.
