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Media
Kit
Summary
of Baby Catcher:
Chronicles of a Modern Midwife
Peggy
Vincent Bio
Reviews
An
Interview with Peggy Vincent
Peggy
Interviewed for Article About Writing
Contact
Peggy Vincent
If
your organization or bookstore wishes to schedule a reading, talk,
or workshop, please contact my publicist at Scribner, Erin Cox,
(212) 632-4950 or email erin.cox@simonandschuster.com
Summary
of Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife
BABY CATCHER, a tale of narrative nonfiction, cavorts with drama,
hilarity, and tenderness through the career of Peggy Vincent,
a midwife in Berkeley, California.
Peggy transports her readers into a fascinating world that few
experience: the world of a midwife doing both home and hospital
births in a unique urban setting. We follow as she rushes from
the hospital delivery of a teenage welfare mom to the home of
an astrologer married to a paraplegic.
Hitchhiking along in her VW bug, we meet women like Megan, a Scot
who delivers on a leaky sailboat during the storm of the century;
Teri, a butch-dyke lesbian who rises to fairy godmother status;
and Sofia, whose hyper doctor-father nearly burns the house down.
We peek over Peggy’s shoulder as she "catches"
as midwives say, the wet and wriggling babies of these memorable
women who are busy negotiating their own unique paths through
childbirth.
Peggy’s baby catching days ended abruptly when a lawsuit
resulting from a Good Samaritan act caused the closure of her
independent midwifery career. The following year, all certified
home birth midwives in the U.S. were similarly affected. Until
that event, however, Peggy caught about 10 babies a month, and
every one came with its own story to tell.
Whether a profound epiphany, a tweak on a universal theme, a dramatic
crisis resolution, or a heartwarming tale of birth trivia, each
chapter of BABY CATCHER shares the feeling of the world moving
aside to make room for one more soul.
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Peggy
Vincent Bio
Peggy Vincent was born in Delaware in 1942, the first child on
either side of her family to be born in a hospital. After spending
most of her childhood in the Midwest, she and her family moved
back to Delaware where she graduated from high school in 1960.
After graduating with a BS in nursing from Duke University in
1964, Peggy married Roger Vincent, her college sweetheart, and
moved to California. After a few years in Southern California
where she worked as a public health nurse in Los Angeles, Peggy
and her husband relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area where
they have lived ever since.
Beginning in 1970, Peggy worked as a staff nurse in labor and
delivery at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley and then as the founder
and director of the hospital’s birth center from 1977-1981.
Following graduation from University of California’s midwifery
school at San Francisco General Hospital, she opened a private
home birth practice in the East Bay. In 1984, Peggy managed to
gain hospital privileges at Alta Bates. For the next seven years,
she "had it all": a joint home birth and hospital birth
practice, affordable malpractice insurance, benevolent physician
backup, and easy access to the hospital for women who risked out
of a home birth.
The fallout from Peggy’s Good Samaritan response to a woman’s
request for humane care during her labor resulted in the termination
of her malpractice insurance. After closing her private practice,
Peggy worked as a staff midwife at Kaiser Walnut Creek until her
retirement in 1996.
Since 1998, Peggy has pursued a full-time writing career, an endeavor
which resulted in the sale of her memoir, BABY CATCHER: Chronicles
of a Modern Midwife, in October 2000.
Peggy lives in Oakland, California with Roger, her husband of
thirty-seven years, and their teenage son, Skylar, their home-born
baby. Two adult children, Colin and Jill, both born at Alta Bates
Hospital, live nearby.
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Reviews
Read
what other writers, midwives, and physicians have to say about
BABY CATCHER
By
turns hilarious, inspiring, celebratory, and frightening, Baby
Catcher is a deeply human book, warm, wise, and witty. I couldn’t
put this engaging page-turner down till I’d finished it.
- Adair Lara, columnist for SF Chronicle and author of
Hold Me Close, Let Me Go.
Baby Catcher is a celebration of life, a book of beautiful and
passionate stories of birth – and the mothers, fathers, families
and friends who assisted – told by a midwife devoted to more
tender and natural childbirth. This is an inspiring, important
book.
- Anne Lamott, author of Operating Instructions,
Traveling Mercies, and others.
Baby Catcher is an exciting, visceral account by a highly informed
practitioner that takes us into the battlefield of childbirth.
Peggy Vincent never loses sight of the psychological complexities
and human quandaries involved in this ‘natural’ process.
The writing is clear, vivid, engaging, and, above all, dramatic.
- Philip Lopate, essayist for The New Yorker and author
of Portrait of My Body, and others.
Baby
Catcher is a startling dive into virtual birth reality. When a
‘perineal cry’ rings out, we nearly drop the book. When
contractions knot up, we hold our breath. Page after page, we
revel in astonishing new twists to an age-old plot as Peggy Vincent
delivers well formed stories—and children—into the waiting
world.
- Cathy Luchetti, author of Medicine Women, Children
of the West, and others.
Peggy Vincent’s memoir of her career as a nurse-midwife during
the last two decades of the 20th century covers everything from
her days as an independent home birth practitioner to a shift
worker in a high volume ‘birth assembly line’ of a huge
HMO hospital. It’s entertaining, funny, informative and quite
moving.
- Ina May Gaskin, direct entry midwife and author of Spiritual
Midwifery.
This is a compelling book which I can recommend without reservation.
Through a series of true stories of planned home births attended
by the author midwife Peggy Vincent, vivid pictures are painted
of what childbirth can be when allowed to (proceed as) it was
meant to, rather than the way physicians who have never seen a
midwife attended home birth think it should.
- Marsden Wagner, MD, M.S.P.H., Former Director of Women’s
and Children’s Health, World Health Organization
Baby Catcher, an extraordinary, spirit-lifting book by veteran
nurse-midwife Peggy Vincent, explores the magical moment of birth
and the practice of birthing in the US. The reader is given a
joyful and intimate picture of the myriad ways that babies come
into the world and a mesmerizing and deeply disturbing story of
how she and other midwives have too often been excluded from the
American medical establishment.
- Arlene Blum,Ph.D., mountaineer, scientist, and author
of Annapurna: A Woman’s Place.
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People
Magazine Review
April 18, 2002
Reviewed by Debby Waldman
Attending her first home birth as a midwife, Peggy Vincent dropped
a newborn into a toilet. It survived. More miraculously, so did
her career, during which she "caught" hundreds of babies
in bathrooms, kitchens, living room and bedrooms in the San Francisco
area. In this engrossing look at some memorable births, Vincent
proves as gifted at birthing stories as she eventually became
at coaxing out babies. She has terrific material: the overhelpful
grandfather told to warm up some blankets who put them in a broiler
and nearly burned down the house; a stoic who crouched over her
bed, a dress hanging past her thighs, and eased her baby out in
silence; and the kid who thought babies were attached to mommies
through a "polenta." On the troubling side, there are
miscarriages, a severely handicapped b y, and members of the medical
establishment who deride Vincent and her clients, telling them,
"Pizzas should be delivered at home, not babies."
Readers will sense the steam boiling out of the author’s
ears at such moments; too often she strays from her powerful storytelling
and into proselytizing for "women who wanted to sigh and
moan and deep breathe through their labors." Vincent’s
preference is clear enough without such rhapsody, but birth as
a spectator sport, at home in the bathtub under the loving eyes
of expectant siblings and Daddy, is not for everyone Vincent acknowledges
as much. Mothers who took the drugs-and-hospitals route, though,
may feel slighted by Vincent’s tone. Bottom line: She
delivers.
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Publishers
Weekly
It was in nursing school at Duke in the 1960s that Vincent found
her calling: delivering or "catching" babies. She moved
to California and became a midwife, specializing in home births;
over the course of 40 years, she brought some 2,000 babies into
the world. There's a predictable plot structure to most of the
stories she recounts: the initial meetings with the pregnant woman,
the last-minute phone call once labor speeds up, the coping with
contractions, the appearance of the baby's head, the wet newborn,
the oven-warmed blankets, the celebratory meal afterwards. Despite
the repetition, Vincent's account is a page-turner. It's not just
the risk that something might go wrong (meaning a nail-biting
trip to the hospital for an emergency cesarean), and not just
the quirkiness of home birth settings (which can involve jealously
raging house pets or leaky houseboats), but something inherent
in the magic of birth itself. What sustains Vincent and her readers
is this sense of standing ringside at the greatest miracle on
earth. A solid writer, Vincent doesn't preach the virtues of unmedicated
birthing; she just lays consistent stories of women doing it Christian
Science moms, Muslim moms, spiritualist moms, lesbian moms, teen
moms and just plain ordinary moms. With the midwife's axiom "birth
is normal till proven otherwise" as a guiding principle,
all these women have a chance to make childbirth a crowning moment
in their own lives. Male readers may find this female-centered
narrative off-putting, and mainstream readers might raise eyebrows
at the inclusion of children in the birthing process, but Vincent
addresses these issues fairly directly herself. Agent, Felicia
Eth. (Apr.)Forecast: With appendices guiding readers to more technical
resources, Vincent's latest baby is bound to be popular with women's
health and alternative medicine readers. A cover blurb by Anne
Lamott could break it
out further.
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Kirkus
Reviews
A joyous account, packed with warm and wonderful stories, though
tinged at the end with sorrow. Vincent was only a student nurse
when she found her life's passion: obstetrics. When she began
working in labor and delivery in 1970 at a Berkeley hospital,
a revolution in women's health care was beginning. By 1977, her
hospital had opened a birth center catering to women's wishes
for a more natural and supportive environment in which to have
their babies, and she became its nursing coordinator. After more
than a decade as an obstetrical nurse, she went to midwifery school
and opened a home-birthing practice as a certified nurse midwife.
Most of the stories here recount her hilarious, unpredictable,
sometimes hair-raising adventures delivering babies in women's
homes, often surrounded by curious children, excited husbands,
intrusive friends and relatives, and unhelpful pets. For one patient,
giving birth is "like laying an egg"; for another, it's
hours of hard labor; for all, it's an unforgettable experience.
Ever resourceful and reassuring, Vincent thrives in the happy
chaos and communal nature of home births. When her own third child
is born at home, the crowd of friends and family includes her
preadolescent son and daughter, who clamp and cut the cord. Vincent
is an articulate advocate of a non-medical approach to birth,
arguing persuasively against the notion that "all births
are complicated until proven otherwise." Her own career parallels
that of the independent nurse midwife movement in this country,
its growth fostered by the rise of feminism, its decline brought
on by financial pressures. In 1992, the only insurer of certified
nurse midwives attending home births withdrew itscoverage, forcing
them out of business. In a poignant epilogue, Vincent gives her
books and supplies to a young Muslim woman about to become a midwife
in Syria. An inspiring and hard-to-put-down celebration of natural
childbirth.
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Library
Journal
An independent midwife specializing in home births, Vincent shares
her insights into the profound complexities of both childbirth
and the behemoth U.S. birth industry. Her vantage is that of a
veteran maternity nurse and midwife who, from the 1960s through
the early 1990s, practiced in almost every kind of birth setting,
from homes to assembly-line hospitals. The reader witnesses the
physical and emotional processes of birth through the care-provider's
eyes as well as the heroic actions of mothers, midwives, and doctors
as they save the lives of babies or confront the status quo in
the healthcare system. The three decades of Vincent's practice
saw momentous changes in maternity care, which has resulted in
a more humane approach to childbirth in our culture. These stories
offer a ground-level view of this evolution and also show areas
(particularly liability and insurance) where further progress
is badly needed. Including a bibliography of scientific studies
on the safety of midwife-attended birth, this inspirational and
highly informative book is recommended for all public libraries
and specialized collections on women's or healthcare issues.
Noemie Maxwell Vassilakis, Seattle Midwifery Sch.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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"With
stories culled from thousands of home births, retired midwife
Peggy Vincent has forged a compelling memoir, a ride-along with
a midwife, a series of voyeuristic journeys during which the reader
witnesses over and over one of the most intimate experiences of
humanity: childbirth."
~ Kathy Briccetti, SF Chronicle
(Click
to read full review)
An
Interview with Peggy Vincent
Q.
Can you describe BABY CATCHER in one sentence?
A. BABY CATCHER is a memoir of my years as a Berkeley midwife
doing both home births and hospital births, a career that was
cut short by fallout from a lawsuit.
Q. What motivated you to write this book?
A. I wrote BABY CATCHER as a celebration of the best years of
nurse midwifery in California. There was a window of time between
1984-1992 when a few of us had everything: supportive backup doctors,
hospital privileges, malpractice insurance to cover home births,
and a Berkeley patient population that wanted exactly what we
had to offer. I wanted to document what was so wonderful about
those years.
Q. How long did it take you to write BABY CATCHER?
A. About three years, including the rewriting and editing process.
Q. What was the most challenging aspect of the process?
A. In the beginning, I just intended to write a series of interesting
birth stories, and I didn’t foresee myself as being a major
character in the book. But absolutely everyone who knew a lot
more about writing and publishing than I did said it needed to
be ‘my story.’ Figuring out how to turn a book about
lots of women having babies into a book about myself was definitely
the most difficult part of the process.
Q. What other books would you recommend to someone who likes this
one, or who is interested in the subject matter?
A. Diary of a Midwife by Juliana Van Olphen-Fehr, and Spiritual
Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin. There’s a reading list on my
website: www.babycatcher.net.
Q. You say this is a memoir, so are the all stories in your
book factual?
A. Nearly all of the names were changed and many identifying details
have been altered in an attempt to preserve confidentiality. But
the people are real, and everything really did happen. I just
scrambled the various components, so many of the births, as portrayed,
are actually composites.
Q. How many certified midwives are there, and how many of them
do home births?
A. There are about 6000 certified midwives practicing in the US,
and they do approximately 6% of all births. Only a small number
of them deliver in homes or in free-standing birth centers, however.
The majority of midwives now practice in hospitals as employees
of HMOs or medical groups.
Q. How do these numbers compare with those of Western Europe?
A. 75% of babies in Europe are delivered by midwives. There statistics
for obstetrical morbidity and mortality are much better than ours,
and their Cesarean section rate is less than half of ours.
Q. How many babies have you delivered?
A. I’ve delivered more than 2500 babies. About 850 were home
births, and the rest were at either Alta Bates in Berkeley or
Kaiser Hospital in Walnut Creek.
Q. What do you think of childbirth today in the US?
A. Sometimes I feel disappointed that so many women no longer
seem to want what we midwives are best at offering: help getting
through labor without drugs and the routine use of machines. And
I’m dismayed, as most medical professionals are, at the trend
toward viewing medicine as a business and not as a healing art.
But I’m thrilled that young women are still being called
to the profession of midwifery and hopeful that the tide will
turn and that they will eventually be able to practice as I did
during those wonderful years in the 80s.
Q. Have you started writing another book?
A. Yes, I’m about half finished with a sequel to Baby Catcher,
focusing on the roles of other people at the birth – the
dads, kids, grandmothers, even pets. And I’m toying with
something about my parents as they age, and how that affects my
family and me. And I’d have the seeds of a couple of novels
in mind, both loosely tied to a childbirth theme.
Q. You vividly describe many home births in your book. Are home
births really safe?
A. Statistics show that the single factor that increases the chances
for a healthy outcome for both mother and baby is uninterrupted
1:1 care during labor by a skilled caregiver. That situation is
guaranteed in a home birth and virtually impossible to achieve
in a hospital. During the years I was in practice, 70% of the
delivery room nurses at my hospital who became pregnant between
1981-1991 chose to have home births.
Q. If someone is interested in becoming a midwife, where should
she go to get information?
A. A good place to start is with the Midwifery Today website.
The editor, Jan Tritten, has written a booklet called Paths to
Becoming a Midwife that helps prospective midwives make sense
of the many options available to them. The link is www.midwiferytoday.com/books/paths.asp
Q. Your pathway to getting published has been a little unusual,
in terms of a quick six-figure sale to a major New York publishing
house and now a foreign sale as well. To what do you attribute
this speedy success you’ve enjoyed?
A. Yes, I’ve been blessed with some serendipitous good fortune.
My agent told me not to tell my story to other writers, for fear
they’d hate me. But, through blind stupidity, I did a lot
of things right. I attended many classes at Book Passage in Corte
Madera, and at each class I seemed to pick up information that
I needed right at that moment to carry me on to the next step
in the process. I paid Dorothy Wall, a Berkeley writing consultant,
to help me craft my proposal. When we were finished, she pointed
me toward Felicia Eth, who quickly became my agent. Felicia arranged
the sale at auction to Scribner, and that was that. I just feel
like I was gently handed from hand to hand.
Q. What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
A. Start writing. Read good books to get the feel for the language
of writing. Write some more. Take classes and join writing groups.
And keep writing.
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To book an author event with Peggy Vincent, please send an email
to PV@peggyvincent.com
or visit our contact page for more
information.
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