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She had already developed what was then a popular distaste for most traditional or institutional authority, and somehow Mount Holyokehad become suspect in her eyes. Besides, by July she had fallen in with a group of self-proclaimed artists in the hills northeast of Montpelier, an assemblage of singers and painters and writers that included an illustrator who would eventually decide to become an architect instead of an album cover designer—my father. The men in the group remained in college so they wouldn’t lose their draft deferments, but the women dropped out and threw pots, hooked rugs, wrote songs.
    My mother became pregnant with me soon after that, and she and my father always reassured me that there was never any discussion of finding an expert in Boston or Montreal who would know how to make me go away.
    Knowing my parents, I indeed believe the idea of aborting me never crossed my mother’s mind, but I’m sure the thought occurred to my father. I’m positive. I have never doubted his love, and I believe he’s very glad I’m here, but he has always been a tidy man, and unplanned pregnancies are usually pretty messy affairs. My conception postponed indefinitely, and then forever, any discussion of Sibyl’s returning to college.
    That’s one of the main reasons that my mother became a lay midwife instead of a medically trained nurse midwife or perhaps even an obstetrician-gynecologist: no college degree and—over time—the conclusion that she didn’t need one.
    Of course, she also believed with a passion that in most cases women should have their babies at home. She thought it was healthier for both the mother and the newborn. Women, in her mind, labored most efficiently in the environment they knew best and that made them the most comfortable; likewise, it was important to greet a baby as it emerged into the world in a room that was warm, and to catch it with hands that were kind. The whole idea of salad server-like forceps and abdominal transducers irritated my mother, and—eventually, this would prove to be the cruelest irony of all—she would give a laboring woman every chance in the worldto deliver vaginally. In some cases, she waited for days, always patiently, before she would take the woman to a hospital where a doctor would anesthetize her, then cut through her abdominal and uterine walls and lift the startled child into the fluorescent lights of an operating room.
    My mother knew home birth wasn’t for everyone, but she wanted it to remain a viable option for those who were interested. And if she had ever become a doctor or nurse-midwife, the state’s Board of Medical Practice would have tried to force her to practice in a hospital.
    That was how the regulations worked then; that’s how they work now. If doctors and nurse-midwives deliver babies at home, they do so without malpractice insurance or state sanction. So from my mother’s perspective, there was no reason to get any sort of medical degree. She knew what she was doing.
    Did Sibyl Danforth dislike hospitals and what her prosecutors would describe as the medical establishment? For a time, I think she did. Was she, as they called her, a renegade? You bet. (Although when accused of being a renegade in court, she smiled and said, “I prefer to think of myself as a pioneer.” Whenever I come across that exchange in the piles of court papers I’ve amassed, I grin.)
    There was a certain humor to her anti–ob-gyn bias that never came out at the trial. In one photo of her taken in 1969, she’s leaning against the back of a VW Beetle, and there by her knees are two bumper stickers: QUESTION AUTHORITY! and ONLY DUCKS SHOULD BE QUACKS. The same misgivings that she had for what she perceived to be the entrenched power of professors and college presidents, she had for physicians and hospital administrators as well.
    And while she largely got over her distrust of doctors—while she never dawdled when she decided a woman needed medical