Mother's Choice: New Midwifery Clinic Opens At Boulder Hospital

BOULDER, CO - For the first time, mothers-to-be in Boulder County can choose to have a midwife-assisted birth in a hospital setting. Boulder County Health last week launched Foothills Community Midwives, a new clinic that provides both maternal and gynecological care.

The four nurse midwives who work there “focus on building close, collaborative relationships with women that can last a lifetime,” according to the clinic website.

To become a midwife, a certified nurse must take additional graduate courses in the discipline. Midwives strive to provide more personal, holistic care for the women they work with, and they see pregnancy and childbirth as a natural process rather than a medical condition. One recent study in the research journal PLOS ONE documented a correlation between increased integration of midwives into local medical systems and more successful births.

Paula Creevy, a local doula (or midwife’s assistant) who trained in the Bay Area, was excited by the prospect of the new clinic but still reserved some enthusiasm.

“Birth sometimes takes a really long time… like, really long,” said Creevy. “That’s hard to schedule when you have limited beds. The temptation is to hurry it along, right? The fundamental question is, can a hospital realistically support the way birth actually happens?”

As the Senior Midwife at Boulder’s new clinic, Paige Swales is confident in her partnership with the hospital. Though she and her fellow practitioners strive for intervention-free births, she told the Daily Camera this week that having physicians in the same building "gives us a bit of a safety net. We have anesthesia available, we have an operating room available. Patients, of course, don't have to have any intervention, but it is there is if they need it."

Foothills Community Midwives is now accepting new patients.

Photo Credit: Jacek Sopotnicki/imageBROKER/Shutterstock