- International Midwives Day is celebrated on 5 May. The opportunity to honour the work of midwives and promote awareness of the crucial care that midwives provide to mothers and their newborns.
- A Midwife is a health professional trained to provide support, care, and education during pregnancy, labour and birth, and for mother and baby following the birth. In New Zealand Midwives are chosen by 90% of women as their LMC.
- LMC stands for “Lead Maternity Carer.” You decide who provides your Maternity care. Your LMC will support you through pregnancy, birth, and until your baby is 4-6 weeks old. Your LMC can be a Midwife, a specialist doctor (an obstetrician) or, in some areas, a general practitioner (a GP) who has been specially trained to care for pregnant women. In New Zealand maternity services are free for most women. Find out if you can get free maternity care. Note, if you choose a specialist doctor you will pay for your maternity care.
- How to find your LMC? When you find out you are pregnant choose your LMC as early as possible. This can help the health of you and baby right from the early weeks. It’s important you have someone you feel comfortable with. See the Choosing a midwife or specialist doctor page for a list of questions that you can ask before you choose. Visit Find Your Midwife or talk to your doctor or nurse about finding a midwife in your area. Your local birthing unit or hospital will also help.
- Interesting facts about Midwives:
Midwifery practise can be traced back to the palaeolithic era (40,000 B.C.), where women gave birth in often life-threatening environments. Women supported themselves during birth based on knowledge and skills they learned from observing other mammals. Indigenous cultures, worldwide, practised various traditions around birth, many of them spiritual and rooted in nature and herbal medicine.
- Midwife definition: In Old English, midmeant “with” and wif meant “woman.” Literal meaning was “with-woman”—someone (usually a woman, but not always) who was “with” a mother giving birth.
Obstetrics definition: Latin source obstetrīx, "a midwife." It is formed from the verb obstāre, "to stand in front of," and the feminine suffix -trīx; the obstetrīx would thus literally stand in front of the baby as it was being born.
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