Midwives (33 page)

I followed his gaze to the group, hoping to see that they were as disgusted as he. I couldn’t tell. Vermonters would make good poker players if they ever decided to give up military whist, and this particular batch of farmers and florists, schoolteachers and chimney sweeps, loggers and secretaries and journeyman carpenters was not atypical: They sat unmoving, many with their hands in their laps, their faces almost uniformly reserved, businesslike, and indecipherable.

There were seven women and five men on the jury. Both alternates were women, and so the box looked deceptively female. No one in the group had ever tried to have a baby at home, although I knew two of the three older women on the jury had themselves been born there. There were no doctors or nurses in the box, as Stephen desired, but obviously there were no midwives either, or people who were even related to midwives.

One man knew one midwife, but not very well, and another fellow—the part-time chimney sweep and part-time roofer—scraped the creosote regularly from the chimneys in one midwife’s house. But he couldn’t recall the two of them ever discussing birth while he was there.

Nobody on the jury worked at food co-ops or frequented natural-food grocery stores. Nobody said they had ever lived on communes.

There was one woman of childbearing age on the jury, the principal demographic Stephen was hoping to avoid. She was a woman in her late twenties with stylish red hair and the sort of makeup one usually saw in Vermont only on tourists visiting from New York City. She was a mother with children three and six years old, and plans to have more. She worked as a secretary at a ski resort, but none of us thought she did it for the money. Moreover, her grandfather had been a physician, and so she worried Stephen as much as anyone on the jury. She was smart, articulate, and properly—or improperly—inspired, she was the sort who could dominate deliberations.

Unfortunately, there had been panelists far worse from our perspective, and so she had stayed.

Stephen held up Priscilla Mayhew’s diary for the group again, a hardcover book with a glossy dust jacket. There was a painting of a wooden birthing stool on the front, which was a source of endless frustration for my mother. Apparently it was highly unlikely Priscilla Mayhew had ever used such a thing, and a careful reading of the diary made that clear.

“Now, by the standards of late-twentieth-century America, was Mrs. Mayhew’s maternal mortality rate high?” Stephen asked the jury rhetorically.

“Yes. By our standards it was. By our standards it was unacceptably high. Mrs. Mayhew witnessed one maternal death for every one hundred and ninety-two happy, healthy babies she delivered. Roughly two hundred years later, in 1981, barely one in ten thousand mothers dies while giving birth. And yet as recently as 1930, as recently as fifty years ago, in the United States one woman in one hundred and fifty died as a result of childbirth. One out of one hundred and fifty. You can look it up at the National Center for Health Statistics. Is there an irony here? You bet.

“In the United States in 1930, most of those women were laboring in hospitals, and they were laboring in the care of physicians.

“In other words, Priscilla Mayhew, eighteenth-century midwife, had a dramatically lower mortality rate than physicians practicing as recently as 1930.

“And while obstetrics has made impressive leaps in the last fifty years, the statistics show that today a planned home birth is every bit as safe as a hospital one—for babies as well as for mothers,” Stephen said, striding toward the table where my mother and Peter were sitting. Peter handed him a piece of paper with columns of figures.

“The numbers in this research may surprise you, but here they are. In a recent study, one-point-three babies died out of every one thousand born at home, while one-point-seven died out of every one thousand born in some Minnesota hospitals … or two-point-four in one particular New York State hospital.

“My point? The people who are prosecuting Mrs. Danforth are going to be insisting that home birth is not merely irresponsible, it’s insane. Well, you’re going to see that they’re wrong. It may not be the right choice for some women, but it’s no more dangerous for most than a hospital birth. Let’s face it, women have been having babies in their homes since, well, since the beginning of time. And until recently, they were cared for by the likes of Priscilla Mayhew: knowledgeable, tireless, loving midwives. Women who dedicated their lives to their sisters in labor. Who were these women?

“There’s one sitting right before you. Sibyl Danforth. As you know, Sibyl Danforth is a midwife. You will learn that she is a knowledgeable midwife. A tireless midwife. A loving midwife.

“Most important, you will learn that she is an excellent midwife.

“You will learn that statistically her babies did every bit as well as babies born at North Country Hospital, and her mothers actually did better. That’s right, her mothers did better. They had fewer episiotomies, fewer lacerations, and fewer surgical interventions,” he said, meaning cesarean sections. He had explained to my family that he was going to use euphemisms wherever possible in the beginning—words like
lacerations
, for example, instead of
perineal tears
—and he was going to avoid the word
cesarean
at all costs. That word, and all it connoted, would become a fixture in the trial soon enough, he had said.

“In all of her years of delivering babies and tending to mothers, only one woman died. Charlotte Bedford.

“And please understand, we are not going to tell you that her death isn’t a tragedy. It is, my God, of course it is,” Stephen said, and he ran his hand over the lacquered wood at the edge of the court reporter’s desk. Almost all of the wood in the courtroom was so sleek that it shined, especially the dark amber posts that bordered the doors like Doric columns.

“And no one is sadder about that fact than Sibyl Danforth. Is Charlotte Bedford’s family devastated by the loss? Yes. Any family would be. But Sibyl Danforth is devastated, too. After all, Sibyl Danforth saw her die. She was there, she was present in the room. She saw the woman die.

“But Sibyl Danforth did not kill her, and that is what this case is all about,” he said, and he paused. For a long moment he stood perfectly still before the jury box in his banker’s gray, one-click-above business suit, unmoving. His back was absolutely straight, his hands were at his sides, and for the first time that day I was reminded that Stephen was a war veteran.

And then abruptly he spread both arms to his sides, and with a sudden flourish brought them down hard onto the rail before him, so near to one juror that the young man flinched when they hit.

“For God’s sake, Sibyl Danforth didn’t kill someone,” Stephen said, “she saved someone. Sibyl Danforth didn’t take the life of one young woman that morning in Lawson, she saved the life of one baby boy. That’s what happened, that’s the truth: She rescued a baby from his dead mother.

“The State, of course, is claiming otherwise, insisting that Charlotte Bedford was alive when Sibyl Danforth performed the rescue. Where did this allegation come from? The opinion of a terrified, exhausted, and naive twenty-two-year-old woman, that’s where: a woman who hadn’t yet seen a dozen births, but had just endured the drama of her young life. The State is going to ask you to take the word of this twenty-two-year-old apprentice over that of the defendant, an experienced midwife who has safely delivered over five hundred babies. A woman who probably knows more about cardiopulmonary resuscitation and emergency medical treatment than most paramedics.

“Make no mistake: Sibyl Danforth knows about birth, but she also knows about death. She is too well trained to confuse a live person with a dead one. Charlotte Fugett Bedford was dead when Sibyl Danforth saved the life of the child in her womb.”

He turned toward my mother and pointed at her: “This woman isn’t a felon, she’s a hero! Her actions weren’t criminally negligent, they were courageous! She’s courageous!”

It hadn’t rained since just before lunch, but the skies showed no signs of clearing. Stephen paced toward the window, looked briefly at the clouds, and then stared at the jury from across the courtroom.

“There are risks to birth, and there are risks to home birth,” he said, his voice even, almost wistful. “You know that, and so did Charlotte Bedford. Both she and her husband knew the risks. The State insists that Mrs. Danforth did not share with them the risks. We will show you the State is wrong.

“The State says what Mrs. Danforth did was practice medicine without a license. We will show you that she did only what any decent and courageous person—perhaps any of you—would do, given the same horrifying choice: Two deaths. Or one.

“Finally, the State is going to tell you that Charlotte wouldn’t have died had she labored in a hospital. We’ll never know that. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because Charlotte Bedford made the informed decision to have her baby at home. And you will see that when Charlotte Bedford’s labor failed to progress the way my client would have liked, my client indeed did everything in her power to get the woman to a hospital. Everything. Unfortunately, ice and wind and rain conspired against her.

“Charlotte Bedford’s death is a tragedy. We know that. The State knows that. But given Charlotte and Asa Bedford’s desire to have their child at home, a right protected by the state of Vermont, it was unavoidable—as you will see.

“The only reason my client is even on trial is because we have doctors in this state who want to see home birth disappear as an option; they want the whole idea to go away. They want to see every baby in this state born in a hospital. The whole idea that a midwife can do what they do—and do it better—drives some of them crazy, and so they’re persecuting my client. A woman who is an excellent midwife. And I use the word
persecute
advisedly: They’re not just prosecuting Sibyl Danforth, they’re persecuting her. Her and her … kind.

“Doctors are doing now to Sibyl Danforth exactly what men have done to midwives for centuries, since the days when Anne Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts. They’re trying to drive Sibyl Danforth away. And they’re trying to do it by charging her with crimes she didn’t commit.”

He nodded at the judge and then murmured a soft thank you to the jury. He then took his seat beside my mother and rested his chin in his hand.

At the time I thought it had been a powerful and impressive argument, and although almost two weeks of testimony still loomed, I certainly would have resolved to acquit my mother of all charges had I been sitting in the jury box. But there was something gnawing at me when Stephen sat down, and it wasn’t until my family was driving home and I was alone with my thoughts in the backseat of the car that I figured out what it was: Although Stephen had said in a variety of eloquent ways that my mother did not kill Charlotte Bedford, he never did say exactly why the poor woman had died.

I could probably figure out roughly the number of times I’ve reread what I wrote on March 15. I’d just have to count on a calendar the number of days that have passed since then to get a good estimate, because few days have gone by when I haven’t looked at that entry. I think I started writing about four-thirty in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, and I don’t think I stopped until Rand got up a couple hours later. It was the Saturday we met Stephen
.

That entry’s like a car accident to me. I’m drawn to it, I find myself staring at the words
.

When Stephen and Bill Tanner were giving their opening arguments today, they each had their own versions of what happened, and I kept thinking of mine—what I wrote on the fifteenth. After all this time, it seems to me that mine’s become just one more version, too. I have a version, and Asa has a version, and Anne has a version. And we expect these twelve people to make some decision about what really happened, when even we can’t agree
.

Did I really love catching babies once in my life? God, I know I did, because I did it for years. And my diary is filled with the ways I loved it; I can run my fingers over the words—my words. But I haven’t caught a baby in months now, I haven’t felt a mother’s surge while she’s in labor since the spring
.

And I just can’t remember anymore what it felt like
.

All that pleasure I once experienced has gotten to be like pain, the sort of sensation you just don’t remember very well when it’s over and done with. Very few of us really remember pain when it’s gone; we can’t recall how awful it was. That’s what all the pleasure I once got from birth has become: a vague word that doesn’t mean very much
.

Next week I’m going to sit on the witness stand and I’m going to tell everyone what I think happened, and I’ll probably find it in me to be really cool and together about it. I’m sure I’ll be every bit as confident about what happened as Stephen wants me to be, because that’s what I have to do now for my family
.

But the truth of the matter is, I just don’t have any idea anymore what really happened
.