Laboring to save home births

But it’s not always that simple. Such data are everchanging, and, debatable. Research, reports the Midwives Alliance of North America, suggests that safety rates of home births are equal to or better than those of hospital births for low-risk women (with no other health problems). Even so, that’s a difficult comparison, because the total – 40,000 to 45,000 babies born at home each year, according to alliance statistics – remains only about 1 percent of all US births.

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But demand is still high enough that in her 28 years of midwifery, Goslin has never advertised, nor had to hang a shingle.
The world of medicine, for Goslin, is no enemy. Raised in an extended family of doctors, and the mother of a physician as well, she became interested in home birth, she explains, when a hospital-acquired infection she sustained at the birth of her oldest child left her infertile.

Seven years later and about to begin medical school herself, Goslin learned that – in spite of her diagnosis – she was pregnant and decided against medical school.“I wanted to raise my miracle baby myself,” she says. She delivered with a midwife and, believing that such care shouldn’t be solely a counter cultural option, began to apprentice with a midwife.

With 5,000 babies under her belt, Goslin seems to have encountered every twist and turn that childbirth can take. She points out that CPM certification requires attendance at more than double the number of births required for nurse-midwife licensing. Many of these births are required to take place outside the hospital, thus affording rare experience in successfully delivering breech babies, twins, and handling many other conditions that in a malpractice-minded age often trigger automatic cesarean sections in hospitalized patients. But, she adds, “I never had a baby that I could say ‘if that baby had been born in a hospital it would have been OK.’ ”

Now a mother of five, Goslin has been married 34 years to her junior-high school sweetheart, a teacher who is so familiar with her work that she calls him her “armchair midwife.”

She is a member of a conservative evangelical church. “I’m a Christian. I pray for each of my patients. I ask God for wisdom.”

During labor, Goslin’s mothers find that Scripture reading often calms them, and in the packet of instructions on diet and exercise she gives new patients are suggested Scripture passages. She says she feels called by God to her work, and assisted by God in her work.

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On Wednesdays, once again, the gentle, dark-haired Goslin presides over her office as staff prepare the women – taking belly measurements, recording vital signs, and screening for conditions requiring special instructions or referral to an obstetrician. They lend books on pregnancy, answer questions, and make appointments – “You say you all want to come back in on the same day?” Though she has been paid in quilts or livestock, the customary charge is $1,000 per delivery.
When labor begins, parents will lay out linen, basins and other supplies, and contact Goslin, who, with an assistant, heads out into the hills, her 2003 Subaru already loaded with delivery bag, emergency equipment, and – the mothers’ favorite – Goslin’s personally designed birthing chair.

After checking on the patient, she may tidy up a kitchen, cook for a husband, or read. “Most of the time, if truth be told, we’re not needed,” she says. But at other times she is perhaps actively directing a mother through an arduous delivery, or removing a wrapped umbilical cord, or suctioning a baby that has breathed in meconium.

Annie (who, agrees to be identified by first name) is expecting her seventh child, and she knows the drill. “I pace my kitchen floor, lean over my chair, say my prayers.... When Diane comes, she’s my boss.” Even Annie’s most difficult delivery was met with a sunrise, a moment so tranquil, she recalls, she gave the child the middle name of “Joy.”

An Amish mother expecting her sixth child recalls how Goslin strapped her birthing supplies on a toboggan and walked uphill to her farm when the road was impassible one winter. “I didn’t even think to be worried. I figured she’d get here. She always does.”

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