Midwives vs. doctors in US maternal mortality crisis

"I was baking a cake when my contractions were two minutes apart," Kristine says, her voice warm with memory, "not in a hospital, holding onto a bedside somewhere screaming." She speaks of her experience tenderly. "I felt like giving birth was in my hands, having it at home," she says, "not on a doctor's schedule, in somebody else's hands. By the time my daughter was born, I felt like my midwife was a part of my family." Kristine is one of more than 300,000 women in the United States who choose to give birth with the help of a midwife each year, and one of approximately 40,000 women who give birth at home. Both of her daughters, now aged 22 months and 11 weeks, were attended at birth by a midwife in Kristine's home. If she has another child, Kristine says, she will plan a home birth with a midwife. The practice of midwifery in the United States is not a new phenomenon - the first midwifery school, the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery, opened its doors in 1939 - but has been gaining popularity in the past three decades. Midwife-assisted births now account for approximately eight percent of all births in the United States.