Author Bio

"Be a nurse," said my mother. "You’ll always be able to get a job."

"Be a nurse," said my father. "It’s the best preparation for a girl’s highest calling, being a good wife and mother."

Two very different messages, but the same advice. It was the late 50s in the Midwest, and I chaffed at the limited career choices available to young women of that era: secretary, teacher or nurse. But I did, indeed, become a nurse, graduating from Duke University’s nursing school in 1964. It was there that I met my husband, Rog, a New Englander who hated Boston’s weather. After our marriage, he dragged me across the country to better weather at the border of Planet Berkeley, and we’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since.

In 1980, after 15 years as a delivery room nurse, 10 years as a natural childbirth teacher, and 3 years as the director of the Alta Bates Hospital alternative birth center in Berkeley, I completed midwifery school at San Francisco General Hospital and opened a home birth practice. Five years later, I began delivering babies at Alta Bates Hospital as well, becoming the first totally independent private certified nurse midwife in the Bay Area to be granted hospital privileges.

My Good Samaritan response to a neighbor’s request led to a lawsuit in which I was named as one of several litigants. The settlement of the case forced the abrupt closure of my practice in 1991. The following year, malpractice insurance was denied to all certified nurse midwives doing home births in the United States.

I took a job as a staff midwife at Kaiser Hospital a large HMO in Walnut Creek, CA, delivering as many as nine babies in a 12-hour shift. Retiring five years later, I began writing my memoir, BABY CATCHER, as a celebration of the more than 2,500 babies I’ve delivered.

The passion and unpredictability of a midwife’s life is notoriously hard on the family. I credit my husband’s stubbornness, patience, and versatility with the fact that our marriage has survived for more than 35 years. Our first two children, Colin and Jill, were born in the Berkeley hospital where I later based my midwifery practice. I gave birth to Skylar, our third child, at home on a balmy spring afternoon. Eighteen friends and family members attended his birth, and more came for the party afterwards. We also have a cat, but we don’t know where she was born.

I no longer drive the cream-colored VW bug with ‘Mitwife’ on the license plate and the noisy engine that always announced my arrival, yet I know the feeling shared by old-time village midwives everywhere. A couple of times each week I see someone in the grocery store or coffee shop, and as our eyes meet I smile and say, "I caught your baby!"