By: Paul Levijoki

As many of you know Dr. Heather Margaret and her family, Debbie Pease and her daughter, Ida Darragh and I did a four day tour of 4 cities across our state the last week in June. Our main goal was to educate our legislators as to why we need legislation to license and legalize midwifery in our state and to energize, educate and organize our base of supporters.

The response to our invitations to legislators was mixed as we expected being summertime and many were truly committed to other things. However, for those that did attend, the information was very beneficial, and my thought was that we could surely get our legislation passed if all the legislators and supporters heard the speakers we had. We had great support from all the SDSCO people and other homebirth sympathizers at each location, and our meetings with the Health Department, Board of Nursing, and Governor’s Advisor on Health Issues were a huge step in the right direction.

Ida stressed the need for all of us to be speaking the same things and that comes from being informed. She pointed out over and over again that we are not trying to
legalize homebirth for it is already legal. However, we are working to have the safest homebirths possible with licensed professional midwives attending homebirths in our state. She did a very awesome job in explaining many of the harder questions regarding midwives and homebirth. She also repeated that of all the states that
have passed legislation allowing midwives to attend homebirths, none of them have wanted to rescind their midwifery laws. It’s working in other states and will be
working in our state shortly.

Dr. Heather Margaret had a great presentation on the many studies that show the safety of home birth and her husband Mike explained how to understand the reliability of statistical data based on the size of the study and what it is actually measuring. Heather and her son Bear put on an enlightening skit about a motorcycle helmet, which you can read on page 5.

Debbie did a great job of coordinating the many people it took to set up each workshop. We greatly appreciate everyone’s help - especially those who provided the
great meals. Debbie’s daughter, Cassie, was our camera girl and helped set up and tear down.

I was the chauffer and tour guide and you all should have been there to see Ida come down the Alpine slide in Keystone.he he -

Till next time… Love Windy