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Today, only about eight per cent of babies are delivered by midwives, despite the fact that midwife-led care has been linked to fewer preterm births.
This film is a collaboration between The New Yorker and Retro Report.
“We’re not being taken seriously. We’re not being listened to. We’re not being heard,” Bruce McIntyre III says, as he recounts the harrowing story of his partner, Amber Isaac, whose pregnancy ended in her death, in April, 2020, due to complications. “They dropped the ball on this one,” he adds, his eyes bloodshot from crying. By “they,” he means medical providers, in the Bronx, where Isaac died. But “they” is also understood to mean the American medical establishment, which has stood by as the U.S. maternal-mortality ratio has increased by about fifty percent in less than twenty years. Women die of pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes in this country at a higher rate than in other wealthy nations, such as Canada,
Midwives say interest in working with them has doubled or even tripled during the pandemic Midwife Morgan Miller (left) and Rhonda Okoth with her daughter (right) (Family Photo; Lily illustration) Ashley Nguyen, Sarah Lipo and Rachel Ryan
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When Rhonda Okoth and her husband decided to stop using birth control, Okoth called her friend Nikia Grayson, a certified nurse midwife in Memphis.
“If I end up getting pregnant, you’re going to be my midwife,” she told Grayson. The two joked about the possibility but a couple of months later, Okoth found out she was expecting.
She and Grayson began planning for a home birth, something that Okoth had her heart set on since the arrival of her son, Preston, in 2015. After he was born, Okoth dedicated herself to healing from a traumatic hospital birth that ended in an emergency Caesarean section.