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Complete archives for People

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----------From her Tennessee commune, Ina May|
----------Gaskin almost single-handedly inspired|
----------the rebirth of midwifery in this country.|

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By Katie Allison Granju

June 1, 1999 | With her long, graying hair, often in braids, and her flashback '60s clothes, Ina May Gaskin isn't as glamorous as many other pregnancy and childbirth "experts" seen frequently on television and in the glossy parenting magazines. Instead, Gaskin looks like what she is: a hard-working, grandmotherly ex-hippie who still lives on the Farm, the legendary Tennessee commune that she and several hundred others founded in 1971. Yet despite her relative personal anonymity, Gaskin's influence on U.S. birthing culture has been profound. She's widely credited with having created the modern home-birth movement, as well as with almost single-handedly inspiring the renaissance of midwifery in the United States. And her 1976 book, "Spiritual Midwifery," a smallish trade paperback with a psychedelic cover design reminiscent of the Indian-print curtains on a '73 VW bus, is in its third printing, with more than a half-million copies sold.

"Ina May's contribution to the culture of childbirth in the U.S. has been enormous," says Robbie Davis-Floyd, Ph.D., a research fellow in the department of anthropology at the University of Texas and author of "Birth as an American Rite of Passage." "I have known for years that she is the most famous midwife in North America; now I can say without hesitation that she is also the most famous midwife in the world."

Although this sort of professional recognition from academics, physicians and researchers has become routine for Ina May Gaskin, it is somewhat unusual, considering that this "most famous midwife in the world" has neither a Ph.D. nor any formal medical training. Instead, Ina May Gaskin's road to prominence has been decidedly nontraditional.

The woman called "the mother of authentic midwifery" by Midwifery Today editor Jan Tritten began life 59 years ago in Marshalltown, Iowa, as Ina May Middleton, the daughter of what she describes as a "stable, Midwestern, Protestant family." She grew up a tomboy, wrestling with her brother, delivering newspapers and reading voraciously. Although Gaskin claims she never imagined she'd one day become a midwife -- planning instead to become an engineer -- she does remember checking out of the local library the early natural-childbirth classic "Childbirth Without Fear," by Grantly Dick-Read. Gaskin concedes that this was an unusual reading selection for a 16-year-old Iowan in 1956.

"Birth just always fascinated me," explains Gaskin. "As a teenager, I could always tell you every detail of the birth stories in the historical romances I read."

An excellent student, Gaskin graduated from high school in Marshalltown in 1958 and decided to turn her academic aspirations to English after being denied a scholarship to study any of the "men's subjects" she was interested in. Married at 19, Gaskin attended community college before transferring to the University of Iowa, where she earned her English degree. After graduation, she joined the Peace Corps with her husband and lived in Malaysia teaching English, later returning to the Midwest to obtain her master's in English from Northern Illinois University in 1967.

While she was a graduate student, Gaskin gave birth to her first baby in a hospital with an obstetrician in attendance. Despite her confidence that she could have the natural, unmedicated birth she wanted within the strictures of the medicalized childbirth system, her experience wasn't a pleasant one. "During birth at the hospital, I was left alone and treated like I had done something nasty. Then I was approached by a gang of masked attendants who came in the room and treated me like a ritual victim. They used forceps, and then I wasn't allowed to see my baby for 18 hours," remembers Gaskin.

Not long after becoming a mother, and radicalized by her own childbirth experience, 27-year-old Gaskin and her husband and daughter packed up and left for California -- the epicenter of the cultural universe in the late 1960s -- to, as Gaskin succinctly puts it, "become hippies."

There Gaskin's transformation from mother to mother of midwifery commenced in earnest. She began attending a lecture series given by the man she would later marry, San Francisco counterculture guru Stephen Gaskin, in which he spoke to groups of up to 2,000 young hippies on everything from religion to politics to sex. At these classes, Ina May Gaskin was exposed for the first time to a variety of women relating tales of their own unmedicated, outside-the-hospital births, an experience she found so affecting that to this day she remembers virtually every detail of the stories she heard a generation ago. For the first time, recalls Gaskin, she understood how beautiful a birth could be, given the right setting and support.

Next page | Everyone waited for the baby's first cry