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The midwife of modern midwifery | page 1, 2, 3

In 1970, a pregnant Ina May (who by this time was involved in what she describes as a "group family situation" with her husband and Stephen Gaskin and his then-wife) set off with approximately 250 other followers of Stephen Gaskin on what came to be known as "the Caravan" -- a five-month-long speaking tour across the United States. Traveling in colorful converted school buses, the group stopped in towns, cities and on college campuses so that Stephen Gaskin could lecture. One evening, while the buses were parked at Northwestern University, a pregnant woman from among the Caravan group went into labor. The sojourners had no money to pay doctors, and according to Ina May, their beliefs didn't allow them to accept welfare. Thus, with no physician in attendance, and with the woman's own husband catching the baby, she easily gave birth to a healthy boy. This turned out to be the first of 11 babies born on the buses during the Caravan.

"When each birth took place," writes Gaskin in "Spiritual Midwifery," "we all parked in a sort of protective formation around the bus in which the birth would take place, and everyone waited for the baby's first cry."

By the third birth within the group, Ina May Gaskin had emerged as a natural at attending births. Mothers began to request her presence during their labors and deliveries. She knew she was feeling a calling to become a midwife. But Gaskin still had had no medical training, until a Rhode Island obstetrician, having read in the local newspaper about the visiting hippies' bus births, took the trouble to visit the Caravan and offer her and a few other women some training in the essentials of midwifery.

"He gave [us] a hands-on seminar on how to recognize any complications we were likely to encounter, and what to do if we did, demonstrating how to stimulate a baby to breathe, what to do if the umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around the baby's neck, what to do if the mother hemorrhaged. He taught us sterile technique and provided us with some necessary medications and instruments, my first obstetrics textbook and gave us instructions on how to provide good prenatal care," remembers Gaskin.

With this rudimentary start to her education as a midwife, Ina May Gaskin was present for each of the next births that took place on the Caravan. Sadly, the 10th birth -- that of her own child -- ended with the death of her two-months-premature son, born on a bus in Grand Platte, Neb. At only 3 pounds, the baby lived a mere 12 hours and died in Gaskin's arms. Her grief over her loss only strengthened her resolve to continue helping other women to achieve empowering births with healthy babies.

Shortly after the Caravan returned to San Francisco, the group of 250 Gaskin-ites decided to establish a commune in the rolling farmland of middle Tennessee. Named the Farm, the commune flourished during the '70s and early '80s, eventually reaching a population peak of 1,500 in 1980. Since the early '80s the Farm population has held steady at more than 200 residents.

With a thriving community of men and women of childbearing age living on the Farm, pregnancy and childbirth became common occurrences. Soon after the commune's founding, and with the support of a sympathetic local doctor, Ina May and several other women established an on-site midwifery clinic to which Farm residents could come for prenatal and childbirth care. Births took place wherever the mother wished to be -- usually in her home. Women from outside the community were also able to hire the Farm's midwives as birth attendants at a cost of less than half that for OB care. Today, the majority of the 100 births a year the Farm midwives handle are of women living outside the community.

With the publication of "Spiritual Midwifery," in 1976, Ina May Gaskin's work on the Farm began to receive wider notice. A mix of first-person homebirth stories, black-and-white birth photography and information on caring for women in pregnancy and childbirth, the book laid out Gaskin's philosophy that birth is a spiritual event akin to making love, and that women could take back the power to give birth without excessive and unnecessary medical intervention. These were revolutionary ideas at a time when the ancient profession of direct-entry or "lay" midwifery -- in which midwives receive the majority of their training through apprenticeship with other skilled midwives rather than in medical or nursing school -- had all but died out in the United States under intense pressure from physicians' groups such as the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Next page | Gaskin brought together opposing camps from medicine and midwifery