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An SMS founding mother, Department of Midwifery Chair, Suzy Myers
A midwife for more than 30 years, Suzy is one of the co-founders of Seattle Midwifery School and is currently the chair for the Department of Midwifery at Bastyr University. Active in the midwifery profession since the mid-70's Suzy has helped train more than 200 midwives; and, with her midwifery partner, Marge Mansfield, she has has assisted nearly 2000 families in their home and birth center practice Seattle Home Maternity Service.
In the early 1980’s she was active in legislative reform of Washington’s Midwifery Act and served on the first Midwifery Advisory Committee, writing rules and developing the licensing examination. In 1983 she helped to launch the Midwives Association of Washington State and served as its first president from 1983-1985. In 1988 she earned a Master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Washington’s Maternal and Child Health Program. She co-authored the first study of outcomes of licensed midwife-attended births in Washington, which was published in the journal Birth in 1994. More recently, she wrote a chapter for the second edition of The Labor Progress Handbook, by Penny Simkin and Ruth Ancheta (2005, Osney Mead, Oxford: Blackwell Science Ltd.).
Suzy has continued to be involved on many fronts in support of the development of professional midwifery, locally and nationally. Since 1994 she has served on the Board of Directors of a JUA created by the Washington State legislature to provide medical malpractice insurance to midwives providing out-of-hospital birth services. She was a founding Board member of the Community Birth and Family Center, the first non-profit community birth center in Washington which opened in 1999. Since 2002 has served on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives (NACPM).