Full Circle
Back in 2005 a midwife friend reached out to me. She explained what was going on with the bill to license direct-entry midwives in Utah. And it mattered to me. Not because I ever wanted to be a midwife, not because I had ever had a midwife at any of my births… It mattered because I vehemently believe that every family has the fundamental right to choose where and with whom they give birth. I believe that limiting accessibility to care and criminalizing midwives who took a path different than the CNM path could potentially limit and maybe even criminalize MY childbirth choices.
So I was with them.
I took my family to the capitol for a rally, I sat in on sessions and I contacted my Representative, Duane Bourdeaux. I don’t know where his vote stood when I started talking to him, but our conversation ended with him telling me that if it mattered to even one his constituents, it mattered to him. He voted in favor of the bill and it passed the House 41-30.
But Senator Fred Fife was another story. He was one of the swing voters, seemingly leaning toward nay. The funny thing was, he said he had family members who had given birth outside of the hospital. However, he was an older man and he had some of the same old arguments about safety and doctors and hospitals and what ifs. But I kept talking and he kept listening. We talked on the phone for probably a total of four hours over several days. The kids and I took cookies to his office. On March 2, 2005 with three kids six and under in tow, we went again to the capitol where I told him I wasn’t going away, that this wasn’t going away, and I may have taken Duane Bourdeaux’s words and told him that if it mattered to us, it needed to matter to him.
That night we watched the internet broadcast of the vote from the kitchen of our sweet little Rose Park home. That night Senator Fife came through and the bill passed the Senate 15-14. The cheers that erupted in that tiny home shook the foundation…
So that’s the story of how one girl may have made a difference in something she thought would never apply to her.
On Friday August 2, 2019, over 14 years later, that girl was officially licensed to practice midwifery in the State of Utah.
Amanda Terfansky Counter CPM, LDEM
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