by Anya Bourg
Narration:
The Allen Pavilion in Washington Heights has offered midwifery services to the predominately Dominican neighborhood for over 50 years. Until recently, this branch of the New York Presbyterian Hospital was the second largest natural childbirth service on the east coast. Ellen Catalinotto has been a midwife at the clinic for the past 10 years.
Tape:
We have delivered generations of patients they come back and they send their families and friends, I see patients that I have been taking care for 8 and 9 years.
Narration:
Last May, the hospital began making some changes. They started by reclassifying 85% of maternity patients as high risk, a category that under state law prevents midwives from performing deliveries. But according to the New York City Department of Health, infant mortality in Washington Heights is 17% lower than the across the city. Since October the midwifery services have been dramatically cut. Many of the midwives, like Janet Brooks remain skeptical.
Tape:
We were never given any back up to this. We don't know where this information came from. The Board of Health has asked for this information, the community board has asked for it and so far it hasn't come about.
Narration:
The hospital announced the changes just six months after paying a $5.1 million dollar lawsuit. They were accused of falsely billing Medicaid doctor's fees for midwive's services. Ellen Catalinotto says the midwives were never accused of any wrong doing but they feel they are taking the blame.
Tape:
It seems like Columbia decided that the easiest way to make this problem go away was to get rid of the midwives.
Narration:
Across the city midwives say it is more and more difficult to stay in practice.
The Elizabeth Seton Birthing Center opened in 1975 and was the first free-standing birth center in the country. This past September it was forced to close when the insurance rates rose by 400 percent.
Tape:
I think what really breaks all of our hearts is that women have lost an essential choice.
Narration:
Patricia Burkhardt is a professor of nurse midwifery at New York University. With the rate of Caesarean births over 26%, Burkhardt along with others, is concerned about the kind of care that women receive in hospitals.
Tape:
Physicians by definition are gyn surgeons that's their main specialization. They learn obstetrics but they learn complicated obstetrics and gyn surgery. The midwives come at the whole process from the perspective that women for millennium have been birthing babies, that's what women do, that's how they are built that's how they're constructed. We also do have an inherent trust in birth, that if you let women alone or help them in the right way 80% to 85% of women could have healthy normal pregnancies and births.
The Brooklyn Birthing Center is one of the few remaining natural childbirth centers. Director Catherine Abelson boasts that their rate of c-sections was only 3% last year.
Tape:
12:05 A huge number of women who come here come because their previous birth was in a hospital and they went through this or that interventions that weren't necessary and they felt intimidated into doing things they didn't want to do.
Narration:
One of Abelson's patient's says she made the right choice in finding a midwife.
TAPE:
Sound of baby crying
NARRATION:
Her healthy baby girl Anias Rodriguez was born January 14.
Anya Bourg, Columbia Radio News.