North Carolina Attempts to Legalize Homebirths with DEMs
By Danell Swim
February 25, 2008
For two Fairview women, the births of their first children couldn’t have gone more differently.Jenn McCormack gave birth to Olivia surrounded by her husband, a doctor, a nurse, a doula and several resident doctors. “It was bright lights and a really just cold environment,” she said. “I don’t know. It just didn’t feel right.”
To bring Savannah into the world, Sonya Stone chose her dining room.
The table and chairs were moved out, and a 300-gallon agricultural tub was moved in. She and her husband, Todd, grabbed their daughter as she went into the water, under the eye of two trusted midwives.
Stone and McCormack are now pushing the General Assembly to make home births more widely available to women in North Carolina, one of 10 states in addition to the District of Columbia where the kind of delivery Stone chose is illegal.
They and their allies want the state to license direct-entry midwives, the kind trained for home birth who work without a nursing degree and without physician oversight.
That change, being weighed by a House study commission, faces opposition from North Carolina’s medical establishment.
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