Baby Catcher: A Book Review
Peggy Vincent’s Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife was the first birthy book I read where things really began to click into place for me and I started to believe that birth could, and likely would, look really differently for me whenever my time came.
Over her decades-long career, Peggy, a midwife from California, caught almost 3,000 babies! The book is an easy and enjoyable read with each chapter being just a few pages and containing a different story about births she attended. Home births that were beautiful and complication-free, and hospital births that were the same. Transfers from home to hospital for issues that came up, births in the city, births in rural settings, first-time birthers, and those who had welcomed several children into the world with Peggy’s assistance.
What I love about the book is how thoughtfully she writes about each birth with detail, compassion, deep knowledge, and reverence for the human body and what it can do. When I read the book the first time (I’ve read it at least thrice) I was in awe of how little she actually did as a midwife in the midst of labor. She didn’t touch the laboring person a bunch, there weren’t interventions that seemed out of place, and she would sometimes sit in the corner of a room and silently observe the process, chiming in only when called upon or when she felt like she had something important to say. All these years later, I reflect back on her quiet, strong wisdom, especially when I’m in a birth space where things are anything but hands-off.
Some births happened in the car, one person gave birth with such strength and peace that her husband nor the midwife noticed things had changed until they heard a baby crying! The book is more than just a collection of birth stories. It sheds light on the difficulties that midwives faced in the United States at the time of publication which was in 2003. And unfortunately, midwives are facing many of the same hardships today, 20 years later. Peggy challenges readers to think outside of the box and to stray away from tech-centered hospital deliveries as the only option for how to bring a baby into the world. It’s not a book trying to convince someone not to give birth in a hospital, but one that encourages us to seek out individualized care that feels right for each birthing person so that the end outcome is easily obtained: a healthy baby and a healthy birther who feels empowered, emblazoned, and downright euphoric about her birth experience.
