A Sandhills area midwife has filed a civil rights lawsuit challenging the Nebraska law that restricts certified nurse midwives from providing childbirth services to expecting mothers.
Heather Swanson, a certified nurse midwife with a doctor of nursing practice degree, and her business, Oneida Health, sued Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Charity Menefee, director of the Division of Public Health for the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.
The suit seeks to block two provisions of Nebraska's Certified Nurse Midwifery Practice Act, which forbid certified nurse midwives from assisting any birth without entering a practice agreement with a local physician and prohibits them from attending home births even under the direct supervision of a collaborating physician.
"The challenged restrictions thereby leave expecting mothers with three options for home births: to labor unassisted, to be attended by an unlicensed lay midwife, or to be attended by a physician," her attorney, Joshua Polk, wrote in the lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court in Lincoln.
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The law doesn't prohibit other childbirth assistants, like lay midwives, or doulas, who he said were much less qualified.
And in many areas, it is difficult or impossible to find local physicians willing to enter into a collaboration agreement and some hospitals prohibit their doctors from entering into the agreements. Physicians who are willing to enter into an agreement often impose onerous conditions or charge a fee, he said in the lawsuit.
Polk — of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm focusing on limited government, property rights and individual rights — said Nebraska is one of three states that mandate certified nurse midwives practice only under a physician’s direct supervision and only in hospitals, public health agencies, or physician-approved settings.
He alleges the provisions violate the Fourteenth Amendment, which prevents states from depriving any person of life, liberty or property.
"Dr. Swanson brings this challenge to vindicate her constitutional rights and the rights of the mothers she wishes to serve," he said.
Polk said she and Oneida Health are "ready, willing, and able to provide safe and accessible childbirth services to women who wish to experience a home birth. They would be doing so now absent the challenged restrictions."
He said Swanson has a passion for helping expecting mothers through the challenges of pregnancy and chose her career specifically to assist with home births.Â
Her work is particularly important in Nebraska, a "maternity desert" where more counties are without accessible maternity care than the national average, leaving many Nebraskan women without adequate childbirth care, Polk said.
He said the majority of women she has turned away, including the Amish who choose home birth for religious reasons, go on to have a home birth with an unlicensed provider or with no help at all.
The Attorney General's Office said it had no comment because the lawsuit is pending.