A Labor Without End

"The neighborhood is not the most welcoming," she says. "I certainly wouldn't walk around there at night. But once we were inside the building and met the midwives, we just had a great feeling. It's a small team, and it feels like everybody is watching out for you," including the other expectant mothers.

When Peggie Smith, a soft-spoken 19-year-old, says that she hasn't felt like eating lately, the other members of the support group jump in with comments.

"I've been getting indigestion," one says.

"You better eat. You'll be sick," another responds.

"Are you sleeping okay? That's probably it," someone ventures.

Uncles, a mother of two teenage sons, looks gently at Smith: "Your baby doesn't care if you're not hungry. Your baby wants food. Eat something every couple of hours, sweet pea."

Smith nods. She lives in a group home for other teenage mothers and is having her first child, a girl. She's full of questions and came here after she felt that the staff at a doctor's office was ignoring her. At the birth center, prenatal appointments can last as long as an hour. Expectant mothers say pregnant women are nurtured, educated and empowered at the clinic. "They explain stuff to you," Smith says. "They don't get irritated."

Her words would gratify Ruth, although she isn't in the room to hear them. Ruth hasn't attended a childbirth in decades and rarely interacts with the pregnant women being served by the center. She relinquished the role of midwife long ago to concentrate on the birth of a radical idea: that having babies should make women stronger, healthier and more confident as individuals and as mothers. It is a dramatically different approach to childbirth than the one she encountered a half-century ago.

WHEN SHE ATTENDED NURSING SCHOOL IN PHILADELPHIA IN THE 1950s, Ruth Watson dreaded working rotations in the hospital maternity ward. Labor was often induced. Women were pumped so full of narcotics and other drugs that they became delusional. Sometimes, Ruth remembers, patients were tied to the side rails of the bed so they couldn't climb out.

"It was inhumane," she says. "The women would come up to you later and ask what happened and who was with them during their labor. They had no idea."

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she moved to New York to be with Bill and worked as a hospital nurse, caring for cancer patients. The couple longed for a child, but it took four years before Ruth was able to get pregnant and carry a baby to term. The timing, in 1959, turned out to be perfect.

Ruth's obstetrician, Edward Cullee Mann, had studied psychiatry and postpartum depression, and he had the then-radical notion that fathers should be allowed in the delivery room. Other doctors criticized him. They didn't think husbands could handle seeing labor. What if a dad-to-be fainted?