Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife (cover image)

Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife by Peggy Vincent
Rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m a little obsessed at the moment with reading birth stories. Honestly, I can’t get enough of them especially natural and home birth stories because I don’t know that many women personally who have given birth without medication. I am fascinated with the timeline, the pain, what happened, where it happened and how they handled it. Hospital and medicated birth stories are interesting too; I’m just really interested in the honest truth about the un-medicated pain all the way through and methods for dealing with the pain when there are no meds involved.

Peggy Vincent’s Baby Catcher was the perfect solution to my quest for birth stories. She covers almost every kind of birth or situation possible—even some situations I had not even considered: quick births, slow births, seemingly painless and quiet birth, loud crazy births and giving birth in a moving car. Her book also offers a prospective on birthing and being a midwife in America.

I found myself rapt with attention to every detail, holding my breath during exciting births and crying at the joys and triumphs of birth. There are also many passages that had me laughing so hard I cried, like this one from the chapter titled, “Pragmatism in Action.” After a very exciting emergency delivery at the hospital, a woman who just gave birth, Susie, has a friend named Teri, a large lesbian woman wearing dock martin’s and a noisy key ring hanging off her belt loop who offers to run home and get a few things for her while she has to wait an hour to be checked out. Susie’s list goes on and on, and the friend listens to her requests, nods and smiles and then turns to leave…

“…I whispered to her at the doorway,

‘Can you really remember all the stuff?’

Speaking from the corner of her mouth with a deadpan expression, she muttered,

‘Shit no. She’s gonna be home within ten minutes of my gettin’ back here. Chenille bathrobe, my ass. I’m gonna bring whatever the hell I think she might need to survive a ten-minute ride in a pre-heated car…”

If you love a good non-fiction, with true stories about real women giving birth and the challenges and obstacles facing midwives then you would enjoy this easy to read and informative chronicle of a modern midwife.