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the work involved. As he saw your head and face emerge, I watched a miracle on his face. It was stunning. There is not a thing I would have done differently. It was perfect.”
    My mother-in-law also gave birth to her kids at home. When Patrick and I first met with the women who would become our midwives, they were delighted and surprised to hear that we were both home births—that was a first for their practice.
    Naomi Mayer also figures in my mother-in-law Joanne’s story. She and Rick knew Naomi as the “peace movement midwife.” Their friends who worked with her had positive home birth experiences, but Rick and Joanne lived too far away for Naomi to be their midwife.
    For Joanne, the fact that the women in her community were giving birth at home was an inspiration and a motivation. Her decision to give birth at home was informed by feminism, centuries of women’s wisdom with respect to health and wellness, and a search for empowerment within the process of complete surrender to the birth process.
    “Choice is so important,” she told me, “especially at a time of vulnerability. Building knowledge and retaining control makes for empowerment. Women have been giving birth for thousands of years without intervention. And then birth becomes about men and hospitals and money. I didn’t trust any of that. I wanted to be outside of all of that.”
    Patrick’s older sister Annie was born while the family lived at the Community for Nonviolent Action in Voluntown, Connecticut. Helen Swallow, a nurse-midwife trained at Yale University, shepherded them through the process. There were many little things that Helen did that Joanne loved and that made her feel comfortable. For instance, Helen warmed the stethoscope before putting it on Joanne’s stomach. “A male doctor would never think of something like that,” she exclaimed. When Joanne’s limbs swelled up with edema (water retention) in the sixth and seventh month, she researched herbal remedies and found that rosehip tea would work just as well as any pharmaceutical diuretic.
    By the time Joanne was pregnant with Patrick, Helen Swallow was not doing many home births, so she referred Joanne to a lay midwife who had decades of hands-on experience but no formal or medical training. Joanne didn’t see a doctor that time around, but because her first experience was so positive, she was comfortable dealing only with this lay midwife. “So many of my friends were having home births with lay midwives that I didn’t feel like I was swimming upstream anymore. I found a lot of comfort and reinforcement in that.
    “On a Friday, I began to feel a lot of cramping. But then on Saturday it went away, probably because Rick stepped wrong on his foot going down the stairs and ended up in the hospital with a broken foot. He was in and out in less than an hour—because he told them he was supposed to be on hand for my labor at home—but it was hard for me to stay focused on the labor process when I had to attend to him. By evening time, the labor was getting serious. I found myself focusing on all my friends gathered at the Pentagon for the second Women’s Pentagon Action, where they wove the doors of the Department of Defense shut with yarn and string and ribbon. Their statement, drafted by celebrated author Grace Paley, read in part: ‘We understand that all is connected. The Earth nourishes us as we with our bodies will eventually feed it. Through us, our mothers connected the human past to the human future.’ I tried to tap into that energy of resistance and creativity. I thought: this hurts, this is labor, but I can do this. Thinking of all my friends at the Pentagon, surrounded by friends at home, on my hands and knees, Patrick came into the world. He looked like Yoda when he was born, a funny little head and very large ears. We opened a bottle of champagne and then everyone went to bed.” I love these two birth stories. There are such lovely overlaps and similarities: the