Special Delivery

With even a little labor music

Mickey Johnson, 24, was naturally anxious: she had never had a baby before. But everything seemed pleasantly reassuring. Instead of a cold, sterile delivery ward, she entered what might have been a cheery, yellow-tinted bedroom in suburbia furnished with rocking chairs and an old-fashioned walnut armoire. Well-tended plants hung from the ceiling. There was even a stereo to play Mickey's favorite music. During the long, painful hours of labor, she was free to get up and pace the corridors. Her husband Bruce was at her side during the critical moments of delivery. Almost immediately afterward, the doctor handed him the squealing infant, and the awed father was allowed to cut the umbilical cord and give his 7-lb. 8-oz. (3.4 kg) son his first bath. The baby was not taken away, but spent the night with his parents. "A beautiful experience!" Mickey exclaimed. "I would never have a baby any other way."

Like Mickey Johnson, more and more American women are choosing to have their babies in this "natural" way. They can thus avoid what they consider to be the coldly regimented atmosphere of the typical hospital obstetrical service, with its forbidding stirrups and examining tables, medication and anesthesia, enemas and shavings, and the usual separation of husband and wife--to say nothing of mother and infant, who all too often is almost immediately taken from the mother's cradling arms to a nursery. Yet Mickey Johnson did not have her baby at home, a risky practice that many doctors discourage. Instead the happy event took place within a conventional hospital at a so-called alternative birthing center.

Now available at a number of hospitals, including San Francisco's Mount Zion, the Phoenix Memorial in Arizona and the Golden Valley (Minn.) Health Center, such units seem, in doctors' eyes, an ideal compromise between two colliding interests: the growing enthusiasm of American women for having babies in the warmth of their own homes and the medical profession's understandable desire to have at the ready all the skills and equipment of modern obstetrics. Explains Dr. John Barton, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Chicago's Illinois Masonic Hospital, where Mickey's baby was born: "We have to listen to what the home-delivery advocates are saying. But there are also the wants and needs of the fetus and the newborn to consider."

More than a year in the planning, Illinois Masonic's alternative birthing center is a small, completely independent unit with two bedrooms, a nurses' station with rolltop desk, and a small lounge where family and friends can wait. Because no instruments or heavy drugs are used, only women who appear headed for normal births are admitted. But if there is trouble--for example, one woman's labor was unexpectedly difficult and required delivery by forceps and repair surgery--the patient can quickly be taken to the regular obstetrical unit only a few doors away. Not the least of the center's benefits is economy. Because the routine has been vastly simplified and the entire stay is usually only 24 hours, the total charge, including two instructional visits at home after delivery by nurse clinicians (but excluding the doctor's bill), is only $600, less than half the cost of a typical delivery by the conventional obstetrical route. -

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