Code for scraping, cleaning and compiling the national database of midwives as part of GateHouse Media's "Failure to Deliver" series.
Because there's no centralized way to for mothers to background their midwife providers, we decided to create our own.
We scraped or requested data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia for licensed certified nurse midwives and/or midwives. In states that don't license non-nurse midwives, we collected lists from state midwife organizations, if available.
We then cleaned and compiled the data in R. You can read more about our methodology here.
I'm new to coding, so many of these are first or early attempts and may read a little clunky.
Speaking of being new to coding, shout-out to Dak Le, Mike Stucka and Dan Keemahill for scraping assistance and Daphne Chen for helping write scripts to clean and compile.
Lucille Sherman