The charity that we volunteer for isn't particularly political. Its main stated goal is to provide consumers with information about their options when they're having a baby. It's expected, of course, that the people who are willing to volunteer for the organization will be more radical than the rank-and-file, so in practice the organization is a hotbed of midwifery activists. As I said, we're not particularly political, but when we are, our big political hobbyhorse is provincially funded midwifery care.
About a year ago, the head of political activity quit because of burnout. She'd been promoting the idea of funded midwifery care around the legislature for the last ten years or so, sitting on committees, organizing letter-writing campaigns, and finally she just burned out. About six months later a new volunteer joined who's very hot on the political side, and she can't believe how passive and uninvolved we are. It is to laugh.
It resulted in a bit of a back-and-forth smackdown between these two, carried out serially in the pages of our quarterly publication. The best point came from the old hand: three English-speaking provinces have funded midwifery today (Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia), and each one of them got it under a New Democrat provincial government. So if you want funded midwifery care, work to change the provincial government.
I always have a hard time figuring out the NDP. I think they must be something like California's old Peace and Freedom Party before they merged with the Greens in '96 or '00. A forty-hour work week at thirty hours' pay was the P&F plank that I remember best; they came across as crypto-Communists with an image problem. But NDP is a real political force here -- if not here in Alberta, at least in other provinces, or federally.
The problem with funding midwifery care in Alberta is that there are currently about 400 midwife-attended births per annum for which a fee in the neighborhood of $2,500 is paid to the midwife. Those are 400 births that basically never touch the provincial health-care system and are therefore not part of the provincial health-care budget.
If midwifery care were funded, the province would be paying $1,000,000 more a year for health care than it does now. And that's a million in compensation only, not in administrative costs. Call it two million a year total.
Now, even though it's true that midwifery care is cheaper on the whole than obstetrical care, it's only slightly cheaper. And you only start to see savings after the hard core of midwifery consumers have their care paid for. There would need to be a lot of switching in order to recoup two million a year.
Which is why midwifery care is only funded when fiscally irresponsible parties are in power.