Our History
In 1985 a few very dedicated Independent Midwives got together in order to share ideas and to support each other to support women. In the pre internet days support meant physically getting together and the very first meeting which founded the Independent Midwives Association (IMA) was held in a midwife’s garden in July 1985 with about 8 members. One of the intentions of the meetings was to gain information from each other and to explore the parameters of normal.
Evidence based practice had not come into force, there was no midwifery research and in 1981 one midwife says she “invented “a physiologically 3rd stage out of a belief that a woman’s body knew how function normally. The driving ethos in maternity care was, at the time, a very paternalistic medical model where doctors knew best and women were good girls encouraged to listen to who knew best, (the doctor). An original IMA member is quoted as saying the organisation forming was a “drive from the women’s health movement with intent to inform women they could make choices”.
Whoever organised the meeting would make notes, which many years later took on the more formal name of “minutes”, or do anything else that needed doing. The meetings are remembered as being “lively, argumentative just as democracy is, but with a warm social side”. There were some individual roles for members, Melody Weig the only founding member, was secretary and treasurer combined for the IMA in the first 5 years.
Slowly, a list of independent midwives was accumulated and women began to contact the IMA for information. The “National Headquarters” was a tiny damp office in the back of a garage, the occupants of which included spiders merrily spinning their webs while listening to the whirl of an answer phone taking messages from women seeking a midwife.
Those messages would be answered by a midwife when she arrived home from a busy day, while juggling domestic life around her own family. One midwife happily recalls, “I was so used to fitting IMA stuff very efficiently into the nooks and crannies of my life that I didn’t realise how much I had been doing till I resigned and 3 people took over my job”
As the association grew so did its membership and the phone call enquiries it received. It occurred to one midwife that she was always giving out names of certain midwives to women, which she felt was unequal and unfair. Thus the beginning of the register that was hence forth sent out in the post so women could choose the midwife most local to her or the one she wanted. That original register now forms the basis of the post code search that is used on the Independent Midwives UK website today.
One midwife recalls an incident when she first started in Independent practice a few years after the IMA began.”A supervisor inspected my equipment and checked up on everything she could think of, eventually she looked me up and down and enquired “and what uniform will you be wearing?" I explained that I would be wearing suitable ordinary clothes. ”Don’t you think that is rather unhygienic?" she replied. I looked at her navy crimpelene dress and the frilly complicated cap on her head which were certainly not changed every day and replied "I don't know about you, but I normally wear clean clothes"
That midwife is still a member of Independent Midwives UK today.