Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth

258 Pages·2019·13.384 MB·English

by  Wendy Kline

Coming Home

Coming Home
How Midwives Changed Birth
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Wendy Kline
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Portions appear in the following works:
“Back to Bed: From Hospital to Home Obstetrics in the City of Chicago,” Journal of the
History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 73 (1), pp. 29– 51, January 2018.
“The Little Manual That Started a Revolution: How Hippie Midwifery Became Mainstream,”
in David Kaiser and Patrick McCray, eds., Groovy Science: The Countercultural Embrace of
Science and Technology over the Long 1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
“Communicating a New Consciousness: Countercultural Print and the Home Birth Movement
in the 1970s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 89 (Fall 2015).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kline, Wendy, 1968– author.
Title: Coming home : how midwives changed birth / Wendy Kline.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027018 (print) | LCCN 2018046609 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190232528 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190232535 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190232511 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Midwifery—United States—History. |
Midwives—United States. | Childbirth—United States.
Classification: LCC RG950 (ebook) | LCC RG950.K57 2019 (print) |
DDC 618.200973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027018
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Brigette

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: From Hospital to Home 1
1. Back to Bed: From Hospital to Home Obstetrics in the City
of Chicago 9
2. Middle- Class Midwifery: Transforming Birth Practices in Suburban
Washington, D.C. 34
3. Psychedelic Birth: The Emergence of the Hippie Midwife 64
4. The Bowland Bust: Medicine and the Law in Santa Cruz,
California 95
5. From El Paso to Lexington: The Formation of the Midwives Alliance
of North America 133
6. From Professionalization to Education: The Creation of the Seattle
Midwifery School 164
Epilogue: In Search of Common Ground 198
Notes 205
Index 235
vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Researching and writing this book has been an incredible adventure. My
children were both born in the hospital, and I never imagined I would
be drawn to the topic of home birth when I became a historian. And yet,
as I hope the following pages demonstrate, the history of home birth is
both fascinating and important. The sources and stories that I discovered
along the way kept me reading, researching, asking questions, and hungry
for more.
None of this would have happened without support from several
institutions. Through their generosity, I was able to attend multiple mid-
wifery conferences, take a weeklong midwifery assistant workshop on The
Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, and travel all over the globe to meet with
midwives, activists, consumers, and doctors to learn more about the sub-
ject. A fellowship in the history of medicine from the American College
of Obstetricians and Gynecologists enabled me to spend a month in
Washington, D.C., working in the ACOG library as well as the National
Library of Medicine, which houses the papers of the American College of
Nurse- Midwives. The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College provided
funding for me to research the papers of the Midwives Alliance of North
America, along with the personal papers of Carol Leonard. Numerous
grants from the University of Cincinnati, including a yearlong fellow-
ship and summer support from the Charles Phelps Taft Center, gave me
the much- needed time to research and write. I also received support from
Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts, including several travel grants
and an Enhancing Research in the Humanities and the Arts summer
support grant.
This is a book about personal stories, and it could not have been written
without the trust and generosity of many people. The following individuals
donated their time, sharing memories, experiences, and oftentimes per-
sonal documents that helped to shape this book, taking me everywhere
from Manhattan to Tenerife to Bali: Diana Altman, Suzanne Arms, Alice
Bailes, Rahima Baldwin, Linda Bennett, Kate Bowland, Erica Chapin,
Beth Coyote, Gene Declerq, Andrea Dixon, Karen Ehrlich, Jan Epstein,
ix