Mama Bear Midwifery

04/10/2025

05/21/2024

Hot off the press from NYCPM re: CPM legislation. Please make a phone call!:

Hello Midwifery supporters!

Thank you so much for your support this legislative season! We learned Monday (5/20) that the agenda for the Assembly Higher Education Committee - the committee that the CPM Licensing bill currently sits in - is being finalized *this week*, likely in the next couple of days. Higher Ed Chair Pat Fahy needs to hear from you that this bill is important.

Fahy needs to know that the desire for CPMs comes from more than those of us who are CPMs who want to practice legally. If you are a consumer - if you've had a home birth or birth center birth, used a midwife, wish you had a midwife, would like more options in maternity care, she needs to hear from you! If there are no maternity care providers in your area, if your local hospital closed its birth services, if there are no midwives available to you, she needs to hear from you! If you are a doula whose clients wish they had more options, she needs to hear from you. If you are part of a community who prefers to stay out of the hospital or doesn't feel comfortable going to the hospital to birth, she needs to hear from you! If you support licensing CPMs in New York State, for any reason, she needs to hear from you!

Please, please contact Pat Fahy's office today. Please ask anyone you know who supports licensure to contact her office - forward this email, get together with friends or members of your community and call together. Contact information, a call script and sample email are included below.

Thank you for your support at this critical time!
~Danielle Kitt, CPM, LMT

Secretary, NYCPM

Assembly Member, Patricia Fahy
Higher Education Committee Chair, Assembly
Albany Office Phone Number: 518-455-4178
Email Address: FahyP@nyassembly.gov

[If you have time, House Speaker Carl Heastie influences what bills get on the agenda]

Assembly Member, Carl Heastie
House Speaker of the New York State Assembly
Albany Office Phone Number: 518-455-3791
Email Address: Speaker@nyassembly.gov

CALL SCRIPT:
"Hello, my name is ________ , I live in ________ . I'm calling to express my support for Assembly Bill A4819a, the CPM Licensing Bill. Please put the bill on the Higher Ed committee agenda. Licensing CPMs is important to me because [personalize here, samples are below]. Thank you for your time!"

E.g.: "I am a student {or} midwife and would like to be able to legally serve my community"
"I have had a homebirth and support CPMs."
"The nearest maternity care is [personalize - e.g. an hour, 50 miles] away"
"I wish there was a birth center in my area"
"I want to have a legal, licensed CPM attend my births."
"Reproductive choice is important to me."

EMAIL TEMPLATE:

Subject: Put the CPM Licensing Bill (A4819a) on the Higher Ed Committee Agenda

Please put the CPM Licensing Bill (A4819a) on the Higher Education committee agenda, and License CPMs in New York State! I am a constituent from [personalize with your city/town/county or area of the state]. Licensing CPMs is important to me because [personalize here, samples are below].

Thank you!
Sincerely,

E.g.: "I am a student {or} midwife and would like to be able to legally serve my community"
"I have had a homebirth and support CPMs."
"The nearest maternity care is [personalize - e.g. an hour, 50 miles] away"
"I want a trained care provider at my out of hospital birth"
"I wish there was a birth center in my area"
"I want to have a legal, licensed CPM attend my births."
"Reproductive choice is important to me."

03/26/2024

My good friend Cynthia is teaching this webinar. She is amazing!

01/10/2024

Midwives need your help!

We are working hard to grow more midwives and we need Certified Professional Midwife licensure to do this. Right now only CNMs and CMs are eligible for licensure in NYS which severely limits the number of midwives.

You can help grow more midwives by:
1) Signing on to the CPM support letter (follow link)
https://forms.gle/S5gJQFU35QWBkUKFA

2) Joining us on lobby day Jan 23rd and/or calling or setting up a visit with you local state reps and tell them to support the bill if they have not already.

Here is the senate version of the bill:
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S310/amendment/A

Here is the assembly version of the bill:
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/A4819/amendment/A #:~:text=The%20state%20board%20of%20midwifery,hundred%20eight%20of%20this%20title.

You check to see if your reps have co-sponsored and if they have not, then ask them to. We also need to put the pressure on to get the bill out of committee and on to the floor for a vote!

Lobby Day Info:
No experience is required to participate in the Day of Action. We plan to provide virtual training leading up to the Day of Action. Plus, you’ll always be accompanied in your meetings by NY CPM members and experienced advocates.

If you’d like to join us for our Lobby Day, please complete the following sign up form: https://forms.gle/9t4uViNoF43frbwf9

01/04/2024

My dear friend and amazing birth worker medical anthropologist extraordinaire Cynthia Ingar is holding another Conscious Conception workshop. This is great for those TTC and all birth workers. Cynthia also holds in-person Andean Birth Way doula trainings down in Peru if you are looking to deepen your birth work super powers. Cynthia is incredible!

First Call
🌊 for this "Conscious Conception" unique soul-workshop✨✨✨ (online)

🪶 Open registrations for our intimate woman’s wisdom circle, if you are feeling this cosmic cradle call, birthworkers & sacred midwives/birthkeepers who support women in their Mama-journeys, or interested in delving in the wisdom of woman’s Rites of Passage & Andean feminine medicine and the Realm of spirit-babies & their Consciousness, who want to deepen into their sacred fertility and womb medicine, or who want to celebrate & integrate their own journeys around initiating new Life 🪺

* Deadline for registrations: January 22nd 🪶

In this going-within Conscious Conception Preparation workshop you will get to:

🐚Know your sacred fertility: menstrual and lunar calendar
🐚Embrace your fertility and heal your relation with her
🐚Deepen into your Womb Medicine
🐚Clear your womb energetically: womb mandala & of your relations
🐚Conscious Conception Preparation: tools, self-care & ritual
🐚Cosmic Cradle wisdom and babies-in spirit
🐚 Andean Cosmovision around fertility, sacred conception, reproduction, and rituals & self-reflection tools around fertility challenges & obstacles
🐚The Field of Abundance: ‘giving gratitude from the beginning’
🐚Aligning your internal and cosmic Timings
🐚Clearing socio-cultural belief systems: family & reproduction
🐚Using this new beginning-creation as an opportunity of wisdom, inner connection & cosmic spiritual connection
🐚Connect with your spirit-baby in a conscious and profound way
🐚Nutrition to optimize your fertility
🐚Lunar wisdom around conception & birth
🐚Protect in a conscious way early life: obstetrical-medical myths arounds tests and evidence around pregnancy & birth
🐚 Ultrasounds: the little known truths around their effects on babies and their results/(mis)diagnosis
🐚Tools and knowledge to make informed decisions/choices in your pregnancy in your 1st trimester (and beyond!)

In celebration and in honoring the start of Life 🙏✨

Duration: 8 hours
Dates: February 3-4 ~ 9 am to 1 pm (Peru time)

To register email cynthiaingar@gmail.com

01/04/2024

My dear friend and amazing birth worker Peruvian medical anthropologist extraordinaire is holding another amazing workshop. She also holds regular Andean Birth Way workshops down in Peru if you want to deepen your birth work super powers.

First Call
🌊 for this "Conscious Conception" unique soul-workshop✨✨✨ (online)

🪶 Open registrations for our intimate woman’s wisdom circle, if you are feeling this cosmic cradle call, birthworkers & sacred midwives/birthkeepers who support women in their Mama-journeys, or interested in delving in the wisdom of woman’s Rites of Passage & Andean feminine medicine and the Realm of spirit-babies & their Consciousness, who want to deepen into their sacred fertility and womb medicine, or who want to celebrate & integrate their own journeys around initiating new Life 🪺

* Deadline for registrations: January 22nd 🪶

In this going-within Conscious Conception Preparation workshop you will get to:

🐚Know your sacred fertility: menstrual and lunar calendar
🐚Embrace your fertility and heal your relation with her
🐚Deepen into your Womb Medicine
🐚Clear your womb energetically: womb mandala & of your relations
🐚Conscious Conception Preparation: tools, self-care & ritual
🐚Cosmic Cradle wisdom and babies-in spirit
🐚 Andean Cosmovision around fertility, sacred conception, reproduction, and rituals & self-reflection tools around fertility challenges & obstacles
🐚The Field of Abundance: ‘giving gratitude from the beginning’
🐚Aligning your internal and cosmic Timings
🐚Clearing socio-cultural belief systems: family & reproduction
🐚Using this new beginning-creation as an opportunity of wisdom, inner connection & cosmic spiritual connection
🐚Connect with your spirit-baby in a conscious and profound way
🐚Nutrition to optimize your fertility
🐚Lunar wisdom around conception & birth
🐚Protect in a conscious way early life: obstetrical-medical myths arounds tests and evidence around pregnancy & birth
🐚 Ultrasounds: the little known truths around their effects on babies and their results/(mis)diagnosis
🐚Tools and knowledge to make informed decisions/choices in your pregnancy in your 1st trimester (and beyond!)

In celebration and in honoring the start of Life 🙏✨

Duration: 8 hours
Dates: February 3-4 ~ 9 am to 1 pm (Peru time)

To register email cynthiaingar@gmail.com

10/14/2023

For those TTC- this amazing workshop is for you!

05/01/2023

Great event this Friday!

In this film by Steph Smith, Indigenous midwives from five continents relate their life stories and discuss the joys and challenges of their profession, interwoven with testimony from medical anthr…

03/25/2023

It is happening!! 👏👏

Ever since our first born, and our amazing experience with our childbirth education , our amazing birth doula , and the postpartum groups we attended in Austin, I have had a dream to start something like that in my hometown. I have been a birth doula for a few years, and have big dreams of building a birth & postpartum community here in Central NY. I am so thrilled to announce that I am starting to host a postpartum meetup group at the end of this month!

Join us at the New Hartford Public Library, downstairs in the Sammon Room on some upcoming Friday mornings from 10:30-12 to just mingle, have some coffee & snacks, talk about your triumphs or struggles as a mom, or just to straight up get out of the house to celebrate the end of the week!

Please join me, and share this far and wide so that everyone who needs this can see it. We are here for you, we know it is hard and we want to extend the support and grow your village. Casual peer led conversations, with no pressure to speak. Come hang & show us your cute little babe. ❤️

Message me with any questions!

02/16/2023

"I cringe every time I hear a healthcare provider say “at least mom has a healthy baby” directly after their patient has gone through a very traumatic experience in childbirth. We should want more than healthy babies after birth. We should want birthing people to still feel whole, not feel like a vessel who has been shown no regard for their mental health or well-being. We need to raise the bar on what is acceptable maternity care. It is not fair that birthing people, especially Black people, have to go into labor on defense because they are chronically aware of what they are up against: a racist, ableist, xenophobic and profit-driven health care system."

We can and should do better. We have the answers. This is just a matter a political will. Make those calls to the mayor's office!

Guest Column | With the maternal mortality rate in Onondaga County being over 85% higher than the national average, our guest writer, a doula in the area, looks for ways to help.