Celeste Tanner, a 30-year-old nurse, had never known anyone who had a baby in a hospital – or anyone who used drugs to dull the pain – until a month ago.
The third child and first daughter of a midwife, Tanner grew up around women who had their babies at home. She was taught that certain medications and procedures are needed for ill mothers or babies, but that birthing shouldn’t be treated as a process to “endure and get through.”
“Not all pain is bad pain, and it wasn’t the focus of the birth,” says Tanner. “The focus was the woman and her baby, and really bringing attention to their needs at the time.”
Tanner’s own natural birth was celebrated in her Auburn home, as well as on the front cover and pages of Illinois Times, in March 1980 [see “Priestess of home birth: A birth teacher’s baby is born,” March 21-27, 1980].
Her mother, Cat Feral, a Springfield-area midwife well-known for illegally assisting homebirths, had recently been subpoenaed by the state to release records of her patients, but still invited family, friends and the media to experience her daughter’s birth. After years of underground midwifery in Illinois, Feral first moved her family to Washington, and now lives in Oregon.
When Feral started in the ’70s, Illinois law prohibited midwives from attending homebirths unless a doctor was present. Surprisingly, not much has changed since then.
Over the years, midwifery split into two factions, each bound by different rules.
Certified nurse midwives, or resident nurses who complete master’s training in midwifery, are allowed to attend births in hospitals or in a home with a doctor’s written consent. Certified professional midwives, or those like Feral who learn the profession through classes and apprenticeships, are still outlawed from openly practicing as primary care providers in either setting.
The Coalition for Illinois Midwifery has been working to secure equal rights for certified professional midwives through such legislation as the Homebirth Safety Act. This bill, introduced in January 2009, seeks to license certified professional midwives based on the credentials they receive after training, so they can practice legally alongside other state maternity care providers.
Tanner never considered being a midwife like her mother, she says, but became a nurse based on her exposure to health care. She didn’t grow up in an anti-Western medicine home, she explains; her family adhered to the belief that Western medicine isn’t always necessary.
Thirty years after her birth, she now lives in Portland, Ore., and is still helping her mother show other mothers that they have a choice.
“It’s not that they need to have homebirths, or they need to have hospital births, but they need to understand that there’s a choice out there,” Tanner says. “And it’s a viable choice, not a weird hippie choice. This is something that they can do, and it can be done safely.”