Updates from NACPM

September 29, 2025
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Upholding Informed Choice: Midwifery’s Role in Emerging Public Health Questions

In recent months, questions have surfaced around issues such as the administration of the COVID-19 vaccine and use of acetaminophen during pregnancy. We understand how quickly such concerns can raise uncertainty for midwives and the families we serve. At NACPM, we believe the midwive's role is not to dictate choices, but to ensure that every client has access to clear, evidence-based information, supportive alternatives, and the space to make decisions aligned with their own values and circumstances.We affirm that midwifery is a human rights profession, grounded in the principles of informed choice and bodily autonomy. While evidence matters  people’s decisions are also shaped by lived experience, cultural context, financial realities, and histories of exclusion or harm within the medical system. That is why NACPM holds space for for peer-reviewed studies and the wisdom of practices that have served communities for generations alongside reverence for body autonomy.
Our commitment is threefold:

• Evidence: We draw on the best available research to provide accurate, up-to-date information on health risks, treatments, and alternatives.
• Equity: We recognize that policies and funding decisions often limit access to care, especially for Black, Indigenous, rural, and marginalized families, and we advocate to expand, not restrict, those options.
• Autonomy: We believe every person has the right to decide what is best for themselves and their families, free from coercion and supported by trusted care.

Whether the topic is pain relief in pregnancy, vaccine access, or other emerging public health concerns, NACPM will continue to walk alongside midwives and the communities they serve; ensuring that client voices remain central, and that care is delivered with dignity, transparency, and respect.
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COVID-19, Vaccines, and Pregnancy
Acetaminophen Use in Pregnancy

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Aligned: National and State Goals forging toward an inclusive future, honoring the wisdom and courage of our ancestors

NACPM’s purpose is to be a powerful, collective voice for Certified Professional Midwives. We strengthen and support excellence in the profession and influence birth health policy to ensure that all childbearing people and babies have a healthy start.

NACPM Is Committed To:

• Safeguarding the right to normal physiologic birth for every childbearing person
• Ensuring that midwives are the primary birth care providers in the United States
• Establishing licensure and equitable reimbursement for CPMs in all 50 states, territories and the District of Columbia
• Advocating for CPMs to the public, state and federal legislators and health policy makers
• Securing a place in the birth care system for the unique and valuable services of CPMs
• Investing in a strong, racially, ethnically and socially representative CPM workforce to meet the needs of childbearing people
• Supporting excellence and innovation in midwifery education
• Informing best practice and providing clinical guidance relevant to our unique model of care
• Unifying and strengthening midwifery through partnerships with midwives and consumers
• Influencing state and national policy to improve birth outcomes in all settings throughout the United States
• Eliminating unconscionable disparities in birth outcomes for people of color, indigenous people, and their infants
• Dismantling systemic racism in midwifery and the birth care system
• Ensuring safe, high-quality, respectful care for all women and childbearing people that improves outcomes, avoids unnecessary medical interventions and locates power over the birth experience with the woman or person giving birth
• Opposing the oppression of childbearing women, including the impacts of sexism, misogyny, and gender-based and obstetrical violence.
• Opposing the oppression of LGBTQIA2S+ childbearing people, including homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, and violence based on sexuality, gender expression, and family structure
• Utilizing NACPM’s colonial privilege as an organization to influence policy that recognizes the inherent sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous peoples
• Understanding and addressing the compound negative impact of oppression on childbearing people with multiple intersecting identities​

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​The Art & Legacy
​of Midwifery

C​PMs honor the legacy of our ancestors and the generations of midwives who have guided birthing people through their childbearing years throughout human history.

Many CPMs draw on their community birth worker traditions and incorporate ceremony, prayer, and complementary healing into the care they offer.

​We aspire to revive traditional midwifery in
every community, integrating evidence-based practices to maximize safety and wellbeing for the entire family
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