Whitney Pinger and WISDOM profiled in the Washington City Paper

Whitney Pinger and the WISDOM Midwifery practice at the GW MFA is profiled in a new piece in the Washington City Paper.

Read the story: "Real Midwives of D.C"

Here's an excerpt:

Pinger says she was first exposed to the idea of natural birth in a high-school biology class and apprenticed with local midwives. At the University of California-Berkeley, she wavered between medical school and midwifery school until visiting the Frontier Nursing Service in rural Kentucky, one of the country’s first midwifery practices. “I really didn’t like the operating room,” Pinger says. “My tribe was the midwives.”....

Nowadays, Pinger says, her vision for maternity care is bigger than GW: She wants to see what has happened there go national. “The model is definitely replicable,” she says. “Doctors, nurses, midwives—we can do it all, high-risk and low-risk women, all together.”

This may be the moment to go forth. Concern of a workforce crisis in obstetrics, combined with a new swell of activism around birth issues, spurred by The Business of Being Born and the book Pushed, present a political climate ripe for collaboration. Those involved in promoting this kind of maternity care say they see an awakening among consumers about what kind of birth they want to have.