Betty-anne Daviss RM, MA

Betty-Anne has been a midwife for more than 48 years and a researcher in both the social sciences and clinical epidemiology for 35 of those years. Her focus on change mechanisms has moved from the study of social movement theory in the 1980s and 1990s to the effectiveness of the human rights platform in the second decade of the millennium. How to work with practitioners and people having babies to overcome the effect of FEAR is her present conundrum. She has co-edited Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier, Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times, Birth Models that Work, an upcoming volume soon to be sent to Routledge on Traditional Midwifery and a volume in the making on the Global Witch Hunt.

Publications in medical journals have centred on postpartum haemorrhage, home birth, VBAC and vaginal breech birth. Published work at conferences and newsletters has extended to plateaus in labour and "cervical reversal," a term she invented, which has been revised to "cervical recoil." (In short, the study of the cervix that takes a fright.) Hired by FIGO in 2004-5 as project manager for their international Safe Motherhood Initiative, she left the post when the Canadian-led randomised controlled trial on breech size up the conclusions as “Planned cesarean section is not associated with a reduction in risk of death or neurodevelopmental delay in children at two years of age (Whyte et al. 2004).” She then toured the major centres in Europe and Australia that continued to perform and research vaginal breeches.

In 2008, she began travelling back and forth from her midwifery practice in Ottawa to the Frankfurt Unit at the Goethe University Institute several times a year, becoming part of the Frankfurt team doing vaginal breeches in an upright position, helping them develop their protocols, develop their database and produce articles on breech and twin deliveries. She is presently the only midwife in Canada (possibly in North America) who has privileges to do planned vaginal breechings in the hospital without transfer to obstetrics, but she wants to change that. She has done workshops and presentations on breech birth and/or human rights at obstetric units or conferences in Argentina, Australia, Bali, Brazil, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the UK, Ukraine, and in the U.S. (in Austin, Denver, Kentucky, New York City, Portland, Oregon, Washington D.C., San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, Davis), and in Canada (in Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Edmonton). She acted as the scientific coordinator for two international breech birth conferences in Ottawa, Canada, and Washington, DC. She has now attended approximately 200 planned vaginal breech births.