Israeli midwife Gila Zarbiv is a passionate advocate for the World Health Organization’s view that midwifery is “the gold standard of women’s health care.”
Zarbiv, 41, is a hospital midwife, researcher, mother of four and wife of oncologist Yonaton Zarbiv. She is also a volunteer midwife with Magen David Adom, committed to expanding women’s access to midwifery care and moving women’s health closer to the center of Israel’s health-care system.
When Zarbiv’s MDA phone rings, the alert tells her more than an address. It tells her where Israel’s health-care system is beginning to change.
The call may come while she is working from home, writing a manuscript, studying for her Ph.D., or spending time with her family in Jerusalem. If it involves a woman in labor, a postpartum emergency or another health crisis nearby, she grabs her MDA midwife kit and heads out the door.
From Pittsburgh to Jerusalem
Born in Pittsburgh, Zarbiv made aliyah the day after graduating from Yeshiva University in 2007 with degrees in biology and Judaic studies. In Israel, where midwives must first train as nurses, she enrolled at Hadassah Ein Kerem’s Henrietta Szold School of Nursing, graduating in 2012. She completed midwifery training in 2014 and earned a master’s degree in women’s health in 2020.
Now in the final year of a Ph.D. program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, she is studying health-systems policy and management, focusing on implementation science and how to expand midwifery models of care in Israel.
“I will always be clinical,” Zarbiv told JNS in a recent interview. “Clinical is in my blood. But midwives are more than clinicians. We need to be in policy. We need to be in leadership. We need to be in research. We need to be at every table where women’s health is being discussed.”
Expanding the role of midwives
In Israel, midwives play a central role in hospital labor and delivery wards. Women experiencing uncomplicated births are cared for almost entirely by midwives. Outside the delivery room, however, their role remains limited.
Zarbiv sees that as a missed opportunity. Globally, she notes, midwives are recognized as highly trained medical professionals responsible for most reproductive, maternal and newborn health care. In Israel, despite years of training, their work remains largely tied to childbirth itself.
That makes little sense, she argues, in a country with one of the highest birth rates in the developed world.
“If any country needs to implement full-scope, independent and autonomous midwifery care, it’s Israel,” she said.
Her vision is one of continuity of care, with women supported by midwives before birth, during labor and throughout the postpartum period.
A vision for women’s health care
Since the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Zarbiv said the need has become even more apparent. In remote areas and frontline communities, ambulances could not always reach women quickly and pregnant women could not always get safely to hospitals.
In response, MDA and the Israel Midwives Organization launched the First Contractions volunteer midwife program in 2024, integrating trained midwives into the emergency-response system. What began with a small group in northern Israel has grown into a nationwide network of Jewish, Arab, Christian and Druze midwives linked directly to MDA dispatchers.
Now, when a woman in labor calls MDA’s 101 emergency line, the nearest volunteer midwife can be dispatched alongside medics and paramedics. MDA equips volunteers with birth kits, medical equipment and identifying vests.
Since the beginning of 2026, MDA teams have treated 6,123 pregnant women, many in active labor. Approximately 590 births took place at home or in ambulances en route to the hospital.
For Zarbiv, the significance of the program extends beyond faster care.
“That is a health-systems change,” she said, noting that MDA now relies on midwives to help develop training programs and educate emergency personnel nationwide.
One recent call involved a postpartum woman suffering from severe preeclampsia. When Zarbiv arrived, the woman’s blood pressure had reached 200/100 and she was experiencing serious neurological symptoms.
“It’s not just seeing a woman at home with preeclampsia,” Zarbiv said. “It’s understanding what took place before, what is happening now, what needs to happen next, and how to follow up.”
Another call involved a woman in preterm labor at 33 weeks. By the time Zarbiv arrived, the mother was already pushing. Drawing on her expertise, she helped position the mother comfortably, maintained a calm atmosphere and guided the delivery of a premature but healthy baby.
“Birth is a paradox,” she told JNS. “It is primarily physiological, but it can become catastrophic. The midwife knows when to protect the physiology and when to intervene.”
Postpartum care remains one of Zarbiv’s greatest concerns. Women discharged after birth may develop complications ranging from bleeding and infection to depression, hypertension and breastfeeding difficulties.
Too often, she says, the system does not provide a familiar professional to accompany mother and baby through those critical weeks.
‘People need to know that we treat everyone’
In one of her earliest MDA calls, Zarbiv arrived at the home of a woman who had just delivered and was refusing all examinations.
“Shalom, I’m Gila,” she told the woman. “I’m a midwife. I’m with you.”
The woman’s first question was whether the service cost money.
“No,” Zarbiv replied. “I’m absolutely free.”
The woman then asked everyone else to leave the room and allowed Zarbiv to assess both her and the baby.
“She understood what a midwife was,” Zarbiv said. “She understood what I could do.”
That trust, she believes, is part of the broader policy argument. Midwives are not an add-on to the health-care system but highly trained professionals whom women often turn to at their most vulnerable moments.
Zarbiv noted that MDA’s volunteer midwife program also reflects the diversity of Israeli society. Jewish and Arab responders work side by side, caring for women of every background.
“People need to know that we treat everyone,” she said.
For young immigrants interested in entering the profession, Zarbiv recommends training in Israel.
“The language, culture and health-care system are part of the education,” she explained. “A midwife in Israel may treat a haredi woman having her 12th child, a Muslim woman from eastern Jerusalem, an asylum seeker, a secular Tel Aviv professional or a woman from a remote moshav. The medicine matters, but so does the context.”
Balancing hospital shifts, emergency calls, academic research and public advocacy, Zarbiv hopes to move midwives from the margins of policy into the heart of women’s health care.
“MDA’s volunteer midwife program shows that when midwives are trained, equipped and dispatched as part of the emergency system, they change outcomes and change the experience of care,” she said.
For Zarbiv, the next step is ensuring that this lesson extends far beyond emergency response.
Israel, she says, already knows how to mobilize when lives are at stake. Now it must bring that same urgency to women’s health policy and make room for midwives wherever women need care.
