GOLD Speakers

Betty-Anne Daviss, RM, BJ, MA

• Country: Canada

Biography:

Betty-Anne Daviss MA, RM has been a midwife for 45 years on various continents, and a researcher in the social sciences and clinical epidemiology for 30. She cites learning from traditional midwives from Guatemala to Afghanistan as one of the highlights of her career. While acting as the project coordinator for the Safe Motherhood Initiative of FIGO in 2004, the follow-up to the Term Breech Trial was published and she switched focus to search across Europe for best breech practice. In 2009, she persuaded Andre Lalonde of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to bring Frank Louwen, from Frankfurt to the SOGC AGM to present on upright breech and helped organize several breech conferences in Ottawa, Washington D.C., and across Europe 2009-2019. She has provided lectures in China, India, Africa; and Latin America on Human Rights in Childbirth, using the return to breech as one model solution. Working between Ottawa and Frankfurt 2008-2016, she became the co-principal investigator and principal writer for the Frankfurt study comparing vaginal breeches born with the mothers upright vs on their backs (2017) and co-authored other articles with the Frankfurt team on twins and MRIs in the breech. In 2013 she introduced a new technique to retrieve the aftercoming head in the vaginal breech to avoid forceps. Her manual “Rethinking The Physiology of Vaginal Breech Birth,” describes vaginal breech history, new manoeuvres of upright breech, and the research to support them. She is the principal editor of a recently published book, Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier: Speaking Truth to Power, a colourful combined activist/academic treatise on social justice issues (2021).