News

Baby's Day Out

Continued from page 4

Elizabeth felt that her mother was pushing her toward a choice she didn't want. "And I was like, 'Gosh, why do I have to go see a midwife? I don't have an illness. I'm pregnant,'" she recalls. "It's something most women go through. I'm not going to die if I don't go see a midwife right away."

Finally, in November, Jackie drove out to the ranch and the two sat down for a long mother-and-about-to-be-mother talk. Jackie grilled Elizabeth about every complication she could think of. If something went wrong, where would the couple be legally? Could they be charged with child abuse? And she quizzed Elizabeth about everything that might occur during a birth: hemorrhaging, a placenta that doesn't detach, the cord wrapped around the baby's neck. Elizabeth, armed with knowledge from midwifery books, had an answer for every query.

"My mom was totally blown away that I had all of this information," Elizabeth says. "I think that she respected that more, and she said, 'You know even more about it than I do. I believe that you can do this.' So she was definitely supportive of it toward the end."

Jackie remembers it differently.

"Finally, I had to remind myself that Elizabeth and Jason are together now, and though we may have all this experience and be willing to help, that it has to be something the husband and wife really want," Jackie says. "We have to respect that."

But Jackie had one last warning for her daughter. "I said to Elizabeth, 'I do want you to be careful about who you tell this to, because right now you have to have positive people around you if this is truly what you want to do. I'm probably not going to be able to talk to any of your aunts, who are all nurses, about this. Or your godfather, who is an emergency-room doctor, who would think we are negligent.'"

Jason and Elizabeth made the decision not to call either set of parents until after the birth was complete -- partly because they didn't want them to worry, partly because they didn't necessarily want Jackie showing up at their door to help.

Last year, Tracy Ryan opened Mountain Midwifery Center, the state's only licensed freestanding birth center. Over the past eight months, the Englewood facility has overseen 63 births. Seventeen more babies are due this month.

In 80 percent of all births, everything goes fine and the kids come out healthy. It's the other 20 percent that Ryan worries about. "You know, if I had an 80 percent chance of winning the lottery, I'd buy a ticket," she says. "But this is not the lottery we're talking about; we're talking about your kiddo's life. And when things go bad, they tend to go bad really quick. And usually not just one thing: The baby doesn't breathe and the mother is bleeding badly. It gets hairy and scary."

Mountain Midwifery is located across the street from Swedish Medical Center; Ryan says they take mothers to the hospital about 15 percent of the time. Insurance covers such trips, because the $1,800 birth-center fee is a lot cheaper than the $6,000 the hospital charges as its facility fee.

Ryan has counseled women who are planning on unassisted childbirths, particularly on the risks involved in such births, and she always states right away that she will not be able to help if things go wrong. "Do not call me during unassisted birth," she'll say. "I cannot help you. Call 911."

Although Ryan has tried to smooth the birth process at Mountain Midwifery, she's still uncomfortable with the idea of unassisted birth. "It's absolutely true that women have been giving birth throughout time unassisted. And babies have been dying, too," she says. "If you want to get totally natural about it, death is natural, too. So a very small number of babies and mothers will die, and that's totally natural. But in our especially litigious society, I'm always afraid of the extremes of both sides of the pendulum."

Dr. Michael Hall, who has a private practice in Englewood, has been a obstetrician for thirty years. He has testified as an expert witness in many cases of alleged medical malpractice -- for both plaintiffs and defendants. Though he says he's never heard of the unassisted childbirth movement, he's dealt with cases in the emergency room when homebirths haven't gone well.

"We're there to pick up the problems," he says. "Anyone can deliver a baby. You could deliver the baby, paramedics could deliver the baby -- anyone can deliver a baby, and most of them do fine. But we're not looking at the ones that have no problems at all; we're there to assist the problems that occur." Complications occur in at least 10 to 20 percent of all deliveries, he notes.

"Look to the 1900s or before, and go back to the East Coast and look at the graveyards," Hall says. "You find hundreds of women and babies dying because of hemorrhage, primarily, and then because of postpartum depression. Now we have antibiotics. We have a lot of simple things that we take for granted nowadays, such as medications that assist with the contractions of the uterus after birth so that they don't hemorrhage to death. That's probably more important than the delivery of the baby -- the management of the placenta. And if it's not managed well, they die."

Though Hall is supportive of natural births -- his wife is a midwife -- many obstetricians are not. According to the guidelines of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the organization "strongly opposes" any birth not performed inside a hospital. A spokesman for the ACOG has a one-word assessment of freebirth: "dangerous."

On January 25, the baby hugs were no longer playful. By four in the afternoon, they were so intense that Elizabeth had to cut short her planned walk down the road. By six, Jason was pressing on her lower back to alleviate the pressure of the baby's head pushing against her spine. Though she had no way to check, Elizabeth figured her dilation at that point was about three inches.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
Next Page »