<p>The Japan Academy of Midwifery provides an update to guidelines for midwifery care during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum in 2020 to guide the practice of evidence-based, comfortable care. With the goal of “midwifery care for all pregnant women”, the guideline was first published in 2012 and first updated in 2017. The expected roles for these midwifery guidelines include: in clinical practice, as an information tool for midwives to use when making decisions with women; in education, as a tool to understand the evidence base for care and the level of quality of that evidence; and in research, as a tool to recognize the evidence gap.</p><p>The second update for the evidence-based midwifery guidelines – pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum 2020 has just been published. In this guideline, clinical questions (CQs) were collected from the public and the guideline committee members judged them for importance. A search for evidence about CQs was conducted by worldwide guidelines and using the three databases (MEDLINE, the Cochrane Library, Ichushi-Web) in January 2018.</p><p>Ten new CQs (five pregnancy CQs and five postpartum CQs) were added to the 2020 edition of the midwifery guidelines, and existing CQs were reviewed for additional evidence and reexamined for their importance in relation to the 2016 edition. As a result of this review, 14 CQs (one pregnancy CQ and 13 intrapartum CQs) had their wording changed and 11 CQs (five pregnancy CQs and six intrapartum CQs) had their recommendations added to or changed. “What is involved in medical treatments” is limited to “evidence and commentary” instead of recommendations.</p><p>The purpose of this English-language publication is to introduce and disseminate Japan's midwifery care guidelines to the rest of the world, and to help researchers and others cite the content of the midwifery guidelines in English. This paper was translated from the originally published Japanese version of the 2020 evidence-based guidelines for midwifery care by the Guidelines Committee of The Japan Academy of Midwifery (Tokyo, 2020, 194p, https://www.jyosan.jp/uploads/files/journal/JAM_guigeline_2020_revised20200401.pdf)</p>