This is a two-day add-on workshop available throughout the month of October.

Session 1: Rixa Freeze
Evidence on Term Breech Since the 2000 Term Breech Trial

Session 2: Rixa Freeze
Outcomes of community breech birth   

Session 3: Rixa Freeze
Breech maneuvers from 1609 to the present

Session 4: David Hayes
Clinical aspects of physiological vaginal breech birth

Session 5: Rixa Freeze
Classification, nomenclature, and the risks of different types of breech presentations

Session 6: Rixa Freeze & David Hayes
Breech simulations: Recognizing and correcting abnormal breech labor

See video interview

Certified Professional Midwives remain illegal in several states, including New York, where one CPM is currently facing 95 felony charges. From the 1970s through the 1980s, home birth midwives flourished across the state, especially around the Syracuse area. In the early 1990s there was promise of a licensed direct-entry midwife credential that would benefit home birth midwives as well as nurse-midwives, who desired a pathway separate from nursing. In this session, I share from my reporting on how and why the Certified Midwife credential was created, what it meant for community birth, and how it fares today. As COVID surged through New York in April and women scrambled to find community midwives, the harms of this history were laid bare: demand for home birth far outpaced supply, and hospital maternity care providers lacked the skills and training to safely support physiologic births in out of hospital locations with the least exposure to COVID. We also saw women isolated from partners and doulas and restricted from other physiologic labor support. What lessons can be drawn from the 1990s? How can midwives with different philosophies and lineages work together to elevate the model of care?

Not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. Midwives must be prepared well before someone comes knocking on their door with papers. This class is about knowing what are common ways midwives can get entangled with the law, resource savaiable to them and helpful steps of what to do if you've been served.

Chagas disease is a parasitic infection caused by Trypanosoma cruzi. Chagas disease is endemic in Mexico, Central America or South America. Approximately 8-10 million people in Latin America and 300,000 people in the United States have Chagas disease. Chagas disease damages the heart and causes approximately 10,000 deaths yearly. Approximately 30,000-45,000 people in the United States have Chagas cardiomyopathy. Most are unaware of the infection and have no symptoms. The common mode of acquiring Chagas disease is vector-borne. Acute infection is often asymptomatic. Infection is life-long if untreated and, over years or decades, 20% to 40% of people develop Chagas heart or gastrointestinal disease. Infection is also transmitted congenitally. In the United States there are ~40,000 women in the childbearing years with Chagas disease who give birth to ~63-315 infected infants each year. Some infants have signs of infection at birth but none is specific for Chagas disease. Maternal infection can be diagnosed by a commercially-available ELISA testing for T. cruzi IgG. At its cost of ~$50, screening would be cost-saving, whether implemented universally or for at-risk women. Treatment of confirmed infection is curative for infants, prevents transmission in future pregnancies and reduces risk for cardiomyopathy in women in the childbearing years.