Midwives and Maternal Mortality: Evidence from a Midwifery Policy Experiment in 19th-century Sweden

Abstract This paper estimates the causal effect of a historical midwifery policy experiment on maternal mortality, infant and stillbirth during period 1830–1894 in Sweden. Exploiting sharp changes or “discontinuities” across time place availability trained licensed midwives as an exogenous source variation, we find that doubling led to 20%–40% reduction mortality 20% increase uptake midwife-assisted homebirths. The results thus suggest 1% share homebirths decreased by much 2%, which is remarkable finding given midwife training was only 6–12 months at time. this study contribute current debate about most effective strategy reduce unacceptably high rate many developing countries, especially low-resource settings.