Carr said she left Welch with an experienced birth assistant and told the assistant to take Welch to a hospital if she started bleeding again. She said she also gave her drugs to control the bleeding.
“The drugs probably did save her life,” Carr said. “I’m glad I used them. But I also — it always puts me in a precarious position, especially in Virginia, when I use them. That I’m not really allowed to do that.”
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She feels very strongly about a woman’s right to choose the way in which she gives birth.
“I am concerned about the people I take care of — I take huge risks,” Carr said. “This is a whole lifestyle — this isn’t just, ‘I go to peoples’ houses when they have a baby.’ I’m on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so I can attend to people who wish to have a baby in their home. It’s not a small thing. I do it because I care about them, I care about their babies, I care about their birth. . . . It’s something I feel very passionate about.”
Carr’s supporters came to her defense when she was charged. They are affectionate and full of praise for her skills. When babies die in hospitals, they say, no one hears about it.
“If I had a breech baby, there isn’t anyone else I would want but Karen there,” said Lorrie Leigh of Columbia, a mother of six, four of them delivered by Carr.
It was a case most obstetricians would call high-risk: The first-time mother in Alexandria was 43, and the baby was breech, which essentially means upside-down from the normal head-first position.
The baby’s position wasn’t the problem, Carr said; the problem was that the baby’s head became stuck.
Two women who supported the mother during the September delivery said in interviews that both Carr and the mother knew the risks involved in such a delivery. They both said everything was going well, until it wasn’t.
“Everybody was on board with everything,” one of the women said. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because it is a legal case; neither was charged. “No one is going to put their child at risk on purpose, nor is any midwife,” the woman said. The mom and midwife thought everything was safe. That’s all that matters. And they were both wrong. . . . It was devastating.”
The other woman, a student midwife who apprenticed with Carr for about a year, said this was the third breech birth she had attended with Carr after another in Virginia and one in Maryland. Both of those previous deliveries went “perfectly,” she said.
“This was a reasonable decision,” she said.
The baby’s family did not return a message.
Officials at Children’s National Medical Center in the District, which ultimately handled the baby’s case, declined to comment, citing medical privacy laws.
“I was very traumatized by attending that birth,” Carr said, hands clasped. “It really shook my faith in the process in a way that nothing ever has done. It was just — a very desperate, heartbreaking situation to be in.”
In November, Carr attended to a mother pregnant with twins in rural Maryland. One was having trouble breathing after delivery, so paramedics were called, but by the time they got there, the baby was doing better, and the ambulance was sent away.
“Some hours later, the baby started going down again, so I brought the baby to the hospital. And it didn’t make it,” Carr said. “I’m not sure what happened to that baby, why it wasn’t breathing.”
Hospitals lose babies, too, she said.
“When you work with birth, you’re going to run into death,” she said. “It’s just inevitable.”
Staff writer Del Quentin Wilber and researcher Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
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