Sarahn Henderson has been “catching babies” for more than 40 years.
Credit: Associated Press
Credit: Associated Press
It all started after she enlisted the support of a midwife to help her deliver her first child at home. The birth worker, sensing Henderson had the right touch, invited her to help during another delivery and soon offered to train her.
Since then, Mama Sarahn, as Henderson is known to her peers, clients and mentees, has helped bring more than 1,000 babies into the world — not in hospital beds, where more than 98% of American children were born in 2017, but in homes across metro Atlanta.
A key mission of Henderson’s practice, Birth in the Tradition, is to honor many of the birthing customs brought to America with the first African slave ships some 400 years ago. Those practices were handed down from mothers to daughters who toiled on Southern plantations and were later locked out of the medical establishment under segregation.
“They were pillars of their community,” said Henderson, who started traveling to South Georgia in the early 1980s to interview so-called “granny midwives” — whom she’s rebranded “grand midwives” — and document their stories before they vanish. “The women counted on them just like they counted on a schoolteacher, just like they counted on a preacher.”
Increasingly stiff regulations, cultural shifts and the advent of the modern health care system eventually brought midwives to the brink of extinction, including the Black practitioners who devoted their lives to serving their friends and neighbors. But the tides have begun to change for midwives in recent years.
The natural care movement is prompting some pregnant women to eschew hospitals and instead look at home births and birthing centers. The same goes for mothers-to-be craving a more personal relationship with their birth attendant or a low-intervention delivery.
[Photos: Black midwives in Georgia]Edit info
COVID has accelerated the shift, as has a growing body of research suggesting Black midwives could help cut down on Georgia’s stubbornly high maternal mortality rate.
Problem is, many midwives technically practice illegally in Georgia. The state licenses a certain class of midwives who have nursing degrees, but it no longer recognizes so-called direct-entry midwives like Henderson, who trained for years as an apprentice but does not have a medical background.
The state has largely left those direct-entry midwives alone and even offers a way for women who give birth at home to obtain birth certificates. Most direct-entry midwives advertise their services publicly, and some are certified by accredited midwifery organizations that are recognized by other states.
But they also work under a constant cloud of uncertainty. In New York, a woman now faces 95 felony counts of practicing midwifery without a license and one count of criminally negligent homicide tied to the death of a baby she delivered in 2018.
Two bills introduced in the Georgia Legislature last year sought to license direct-entry midwives, but they stalled after laying bare the deep divisions within the profession along racial and educational lines. Stakeholders believe a compromise is in sight, but they face fierce pushback from powerful doctors groups that have long argued midwives working outside of hospitals lack accountability and compromise safety for both mothers and babies.
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