The professional title "midwife" is predicated on the understanding that people who access their services have a normative relationship between their gender and assigned sex. As trans and non-binary people increasingly require access to midwifery services, this paper proposes an alternative professional title that is inclusive and liberates midwives from continuously reinscribing the sex/gender binary in their nomenclature. We work with Levitas's Utopia as Method framework to propose the title of Lead Perinatal Practitioner.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To provide insight into the challenges faced by imprisoned perinatal women in accessing appropriate information, support, and care and the importance of the midwife's role in this context.
Method: This paper draws on two studies conducted in one United Kingdom (UK) women's prison over two separate time points (2019, 2021). In both qualitative evaluative studies that were descriptive in nature, semi-structured interviews were conducted with perinatal women and professionals involved in their care.
Effective communication in relation to pregnancy and birth is crucial to quality care. A recent focus in reproductive healthcare on "sexed language" reflects an ideology of unchangeable sex binary and fear of erasure, from both cisgender women and the profession of midwifery. In this paper, we highlight how privileging sexed language causes harm to all who birth-including pregnant trans, gender diverse, and non-binary people-and is, therefore, unethical and incompatible with the principles of midwifery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMedically important ixodid ticks often carry multiple pathogens, with individual ticks frequently coinfected and capable of transmitting multiple infections to hosts, including humans. Acquisition of multiple zoonotic pathogens by immature blacklegged ticks () is facilitated when they feed on small mammals, which are the most competent reservoir hosts for (which causes anaplasmosis in humans), (babesiosis) and (Lyme disease). Here, we used data from a large-scale, long-term experiment to ask whether patterns of single and multiple infections in questing nymphal ticks from residential neighbourhoods differed from those predicted by independent assortment of pathogens, and whether patterns of coinfection were affected by residential application of commercial acaricidal products.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough human exposure to the ticks that transmit Lyme-disease bacteria is widely considered to occur around people's homes, most studies of variation in tick abundance and infection are undertaken outside residential areas. Consequently, the patterns of variation in risk of human exposure to tick-borne infections in these human-dominated landscapes are poorly understood. Here, we report the results of four years of sampling for tick abundance, tick infection, tick encounters, and tick-borne disease reports on residential properties nested within six neighborhoods in Dutchess County, New York, USA, an area of high incidence for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases.
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