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For the majority of her pregnancy, Lucy Chapin had planned to give birth to her second child in a hospital.
But then, the pandemic hit.
The University of Vermont Medical Center, where Chapin had planned to deliver, had tightened its birthing policies, like many other hospitals in the state. Only one visitor would be allowed in an effort to limit the spread of coronavirus.
“When we realized that the visitor policy was changing and that the landscape of the pandemic was going to change how our birth may or may not be family centered,” Chapin said. “There were some challenges.”
Five weeks before her mid-April due date, Chapin made the decision to have an at-home birth in the presence of a midwife, primarily because she wanted her 5-year-old daughter Sadie to experience the birth of her new baby brother, Will.
“She really envisioned being part of her sibling’s entrance into the world, and we envisioned it, too,” Chapin said. “So it just became this thing that we weren’t ready to let go of.”
Chapin is one of many other women who have been scrambling to change their birth plans, and adapting to newfound motherhood, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Vermont midwives say they’re receiving hundreds of calls from women who want to give birth at home, primarily because of restrictive visiting policies and fears that they could pick up the virus in hospitals.
“It’s a scary time to have a baby,” said April Vanderveer, a midwife who works with the Full Spectrum Midwifery practice. As the pandemic took hold in Vermont in March and into early April, Vanderveer said she was getting several calls a day from women inquiring about home births.
“These women are so strong. It’s such a challenging time and it’s so heartbreaking,” Vanderveer said. “They want their parents to visit from out of town and meet their first grandchild. They want to know they’re going to stay healthy. And they’re isolating themselves so much in order to feel safe.”
This trend isn’t just affecting Vermont’s soon-to-be-moms — women across the country are turning to at-home births for similar reasons. But despite the rising demand, at-home births aren’t the right fit for every new mom. And when fear is the driving force behind the decision to forgo a hospital delivery, that also raises red flags for midwives.
“Fear and birth are not super compatible,” said Jen Pia-Needleman, a midwife who practices between Montpelier and Burlington. She said her inquiries about at-home births have increased 10 times since the pandemic hit. She’s even gotten calls at 2 a.m. by anxiety-fueled expectant moms.
Only low-risk pregnancies are appropriate for at-home births, Pia-Needleman said. If a woman is pregnant with twins or her baby is breached in the womb, an at-home birth likely isn’t for them. And if something goes wrong, there may be a need to transfer the mother to the hospital.
“If I take someone on who is petrified of a hospital, are they going to be unwilling to transfer if they need to?” Pia-Needleman said. “If a home birth is going to feel fearful for them, it’s probably not a great low-risk situation. And so I have turned away the majority of inquiries I’ve gotten.”
Chapin didn’t change her birth plan out of fear. As a midwife herself who practices out of the University of Vermont Medical center midwifery program, she feels confident that the staff are taking every precaution to keep expectant moms safe.
Marti Churchill, the lead midwife for UVM’s program, said the hospital is an “absolutely safe” space to give birth. She said her staff are taking extra precautions — constantly wiping down surfaces, wearing personal protective equipment — and they’re screened for Covid-19 symptoms before they head into work.
While the hospital’s visitor policies have changed, families are finding creative ways to include their loved ones during birth. Churchill worked with one woman who set up a video chat so that her mom could still experience the birth of her grandchild virtually.
Churchill said she’s more concerned about the isolation women are subjected to postpartum. It’s difficult to adjust to life with a new baby, on top of the mood swings and emotional toll a recent birth brings, she said.
“It’s already so hard for women,” Churchill said. “And add in this isolation piece to it, it’s really, really difficult.”
That’s why UVM’s volunteer doula service is offering weekly virtual support group sessions for women who have recently given birth. They’re being led by Lisa Gould Rubin, who works with UVM’s doula service and has been operating a private virtual doula support practice for years. Rubin said the classes are still being organized, and that any interested mom can contact lisa@thegoodbirthproject.com to sign up.
New moms are also coping with raising newborns in a world completely changed by the coronavirus pandemic.
When Catherine Coteus entered labor with her first child on March 2, there was no inkling that a pandemic could kill scores of Vermonters, put thousands out of work and shutter the economy.
She gave birth to her baby boy, Mesa, on March 5. Her labor lasted three days. When she checked her email for the first time after the birth, she received a message from the Fairbanks Museum, where she’s a board member. It was the first communication she had received about the Covid-19 crisis.
Coteus and her husband had no choice but to take precautions. “Immediately we were like, ‘Oh we have to adjust,’” Coteus said. Visitors were shut out. Coteus’ parents flew in for the birth from California, but she didn’t hug them goodbye when they left.
As Coteus kept up with the news, she asked herself: “If I had known this was coming, would I have gotten pregnant? Would I have knowingly brought a baby into this total mess?”
The answer ultimately, Coteus decided, was yes.
“In our decision to make a child, we were conscious of a lot of really scary things. Like climate change, systemic racism. All the things that make this a terrible place to be a person,” she said.
“And we did it anyway,” Coteus said. “Because we believe there is still a world to see and a world to share that’s worth bringing new life into.”
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