Published: 8/23/2020 6:50:01 PM
NORTHAMPTON — Last August, the foundation of 74 Maple St. in Florence was dug. This August, Kirsten Kowalski-Lane and Ginny Miller opened Seven Sisters Midwifery and Community Birth Center in the newly constructed building designed to meet Department of Public Health guidelines.
Both Kowalski-Lane and Miller are certified nurse-midwives, and between the two of them they have attended more than 5,000 births. Seven Sisters is the only midwife-owned, freestanding birth center in the state.
“It feels fantastic, honestly, to be open. It’s the realization of a lot, a lot of planning,” Kowalski-Lane said.
A birth center is a home-like, freestanding facility where licensed providers offer care to healthy pregnant people who have low-risk pregnancies, according to the American Association of Birth Center. The center offers care including basic contraception, family planning, basic infertility support and gynecological services. They take most major insurance providers, including MassHealth, Kowalski-Lane said. They also welcome transgender and non-binary people, Miller said.
Some people don’t completely understand the role of a midwife, Miller said in an interview late last year. “People think that we just attend births, that we just catch babies,” she said, “and we do the whole scope.”
“We’re more than baby catchers,” Kowalski-Lane said.
Miller has wanted to open a birth center for decades.
“I’ve been trying for 30 years,” she said. “It’s really hard.”
Certified nurse-midwives had to work under the supervision of a doctor until the state law changed in 2012, a change midwives fought hard for, Kowalski-Lane said. Now, they need a relationship with an obstetrician-gynecologist. Seven Sisters has a “consulting physician,” Dr. Gretchen Loebel, who works in obstetrics and gynecology at Cooley Dickinson Health Care and advises — not supervises — them.
Cooley Dickinson Hospital, which is about a mile away, also agreed to be the birth center’s transferring hospital to take patients to if necessary.
The birth center is a short stay facility where people receive care for about four to 12 hours after giving birth, Kowalski-Lane said. But 24-36 hours later, she said, a midwife or nurse visits the baby and person who gave birth to provide care and support at home if they live within a hour radius of the center. For those that live farther away, the first follow-up is done at the center. And for everyone, there are more follow-up appointments at the center.
“We’re finding we have clients coming from more than an hour away because there isn’t anything like this,” Kowalski-Lane said. They are currently taking clients, too.
When asked about the origin of the birth center’s name, they both laughed. It references the Seven Sisters peaks in the Holyoke mountain range, a star cluster by the same name and, Miller said, “between us we have seven sisters.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.
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