Coming Home Coming Home How Midwives Changed Birth x x w Wendy Kline 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. 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