Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

Carrboro midwife offers an alternative

Posted on February 4, 2010March 18, 2010 by Staff

Beth Mechum
Staff Writer

Cheryl Means was tired of the merry-go-round of doctors she and her unborn child met with each month.

To her mind, it was a good idea gone wrong.

“Every visit that you have every month, you see a different doctor, and the idea is that when you give birth there will be a friendly face there waiting for you at the end.”
Means was drained from explaining the same things to different doctors.

“I started to feel like I was the only one who knew what was going on from visit to visit, and had to repeat my story over and over,” she said. “I started to look around at options to have more of a one-on-one experience.”

That experience led her to Deb O’Connell and her newly opened Carrboro Midwifery practice. She was in transition to O’Connell’s practice when her water broke 10 weeks early. Means called her doctors’ office, and the doctor on call wasn’t even from the same office.

She ended up seeing yet another doctor she’d never seen before. And once that doctor got her stabilized and shipped to Duke, Means delivered with four more doctors she had never met.

The system didn’t work for her.

Means now goes to O’Connell for her post-labor checkups.

Kara-Ann Hensey’s situation is different. She’s 34 weeks pregnant with her third child and has decided she’d be most comfortable with a home birth after two pregnancies with midwives at a birthing center.

She’s low-risk and experienced with birthing.

Means and Hensey are two of O’Connell’s first patients at Carrboro Midwifery, tucked in beside Carrboro Pediatrics on Fidelity Drive. After working as a midwife at UNC Hospitals for three and a half years, O’Connell is exploring her passion for midwifery and home birthing on her own turf.

A calling

O’Connell has been a nurse since 1996, and said that after attending a midwifery presentation she found her calling. She graduated from midwifery school at Stonybrook University in 2001 and has been practicing in some form ever since.

Her first experience came while she was a student, with the Amish community in Lancaster, Pa., and her journey has now brought her to practicing home births on her own in Carrboro and surrounding areas.

Home birthing with a midwife is an alternative to what 99 percent of women in the U.S. choose to do – have their babies in a hospital.

“The women that tend to choose home birth are women that are really committed to child birth and feel for themselves that their home will be the place they feel the safest,” O’Connell said, “and for a woman in labor, that’s huge, because it can really impede a woman’s progress in her labor if she doesn’t feel safe.”

Both Means and Hensey say that trust and relationship building were primary considerations in their decisions to opt for a midwife.

“One of the benefits of having a home-birth practice is getting to know your clients, and they do really need to get to know you, because it’s such a professionally intimate relationship,” O’Connell said.

She said not all women are suited, mentally and physically, for home birthing “If you’re committing yourself to a home birth, you have to be committing yourself to a natural childbirth,” she said.

O’Connell is required to meet certain qualifications and requirements to ensure home birth is appropriate and safe for a woman. She is also required to have physician backup.

Safety concerns keep many women from choosing to home birth: If something goes wrong during delivery, there might not be enough time to transfer the woman to a hospital.

In fact, this happened when O’Connell witnessed her first home birth. It did not scare her away. O’Connell has now attended more than 800 home births, and only once – during the first one she ever attended – has something gone terribly wrong.

“If anything, it gave me a stronger sense of respect for the birthing process,” O’Connell said of that first experience, “and that bad things do happen, but they happen to women in hospitals just as much, if not more.”

Means said she wasn’t comfortable telling friends and family about her decision to go with a home birth, out of concern that they’d be scared for her safety.

“I knew they’d flip, she said. “We were going to tell them afterward.”
Hensey said she didn’t have any fears, and her friends and family didn’t either.

“Once you have one pregnancy, they sort of know what you need, when you need it; so I think they trust the woman to know when something is wrong,” she said. “The only thing I’m worried about is that I’ll have the baby before anybody gets here, because Deb lives in Carrboro and I live in Raleigh.”

Which helps explain why O’Connell will be hard pressed to find vacation time in the near future – she’s always on call. It’s a bit different than her days in hospitals; but it’s her passion and her calling. Vacations will have to wait.

8 thoughts on “Carrboro midwife offers an alternative”

  1. Ruby Sinreich says:
    February 5, 2010 at 9:21 am

    I love the Carrboro Citizen, but not as much as I love midwives. But this article strikes me as a bit vapid. I expect to see this kind of puff peice in the News or Herald, not the Citizen. For example, while touching on why women might choose a midwife instead of a hospital for childbirth, you failed to even mention the many other midwives practicing in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area, including the pioneers who founded the Women’s Birth and Wellness Center something like 20 years ago (originally in Siler City).

    In what way was this “news article” not just a press release for this new business? Where is the reporting? What is this kind of thing doing on the front page of the Citizen?

  2. Amanda says:
    February 5, 2010 at 7:28 pm

    What a GREAT article! I’m so glad to hear that women are being given choices. Home birth midwives are dedicated professionals that care for women on their own turf.
    I agree with Ruby about loving midwives but this article is about a midwife offering an alternative to hospital birth not the history of midwifery. I don’t think this is a “puff piece”. I think the public needs to be aware of ALL of their choices and articles like these is how the public becomes informed!

  3. Julie says:
    February 6, 2010 at 9:41 am

    This is a great article and I appreciate the honest tone to the story. Home births are not for everyone but, for many women, it can be a wonderful alternative. It’s great to see someone so committed to providing this option, especially someone as experienced as Deb O’Connell. I wish her much success in her practice.

  4. Mark Marcoplos says:
    February 9, 2010 at 5:58 am

    I really appreciated this article. Homebirth is not discussed very much, but it is a very safe and satisfying alternative. Homebirth midwives are few and far between due to the stranglehold that the medical industry has over birth. The Citizen provides a community service by reporting on a local homebirth option.

  5. Susan says:
    March 6, 2010 at 6:19 am

    After my first two (hospital) births, which in the 1970’s left much to be desired, I had my 3rd
    child with a lay midwife at home in 1981. In comparison, it was a real birth-day celebration, and
    wonderful to not feel rushed or like a stranger with someone new
    every month. I chose a midwife in a hospital setting for my 4th child, mainly due to being 40 by
    then. Being in charge and choice
    of how/whom assists your birthing
    process is key.

  6. Katherine Williams says:
    March 30, 2010 at 6:30 am

    “In what way was this “news article” not just a press release for this new business?” Good question. Please allow me to explain it to you. Carrboro Midwifery is the first legal midwifery run homebirth center in NC. (If we momentarily discount Lisa Goldstein’s legal work in Celo, which we really don’t want to discount at all.) This is enormously newsworthy. And your facts are not quite right when you refer to Maureen and the good midwives who opened Piedmont Women’s Health. They did not start in Siler City. They started as homebirth midwives. Lay midwives. I would say Real Midwives. Because their status was not legal, they were forced into Nurse Midwifery. And they delivered my children and I thank God for them and the excellent job they have done. But the bravery and fortitude and general badassedness Carrboro Midwifery shows by hanging out their shingle and openly proclaiming homebirth is an inspiration. We haven’t begun to celebrate them enough, in my opinion.

  7. Jennifer Brodie says:
    April 6, 2010 at 7:47 pm

    Katherine, you’re quite right in proclaiming that this topic is newsworthy and important and that Deb is an inspiration. I’m enormously grateful that she’s offering one more choice to birthing women in our area. She is sorely needed and more women need to know that homebirth is a safe and empowering option. However, she is not the first midwife to operate legally, Lisa Goldstein aside. Nancy Harman is another CNM who has had a legal homebirth practice in this area since 2002. She’s based in Bear Creek (btwn Sanford and Siler City) but serves women in a wide geographical area. She attended the homebirths of my 2nd and 3rd children here in Durham, and those of many of my friends. She’s a wonderful, skilled and experienced midwife and also deserves to be recognized. Blessings to all these wonderful midwives helping women to reclaim birth!

  8. Jennifer Barker says:
    May 20, 2010 at 9:36 am

    As a mother who had her first child at the birth center, I can tell you, the option and idea to have my second at home was a very easy one. The RTP area has been under-serviced as far as midwifery is concerned and it is nice that Deb has entered the mix. She has the same qualifications as the wonderful midwives at the birth center, except you can birth at your own home. What a beautiful thing. Thank you for empowering more women to birth the way they want to, and the way God and nature intended!

Comments are closed.

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme