New birthing center offers options for newborns

With muted lighting, soft tinkling music and beds piled high with pillows and comforters, the rooms at a new medical offering on North Beale Road look like country bedrooms, or just a place to take a nap.

But within weeks, the people behind the new Baby Buddies Birth Center want them to be places where newborns come into the world in a more natural, nurturing atmosphere.

Rachel Farrell, who operates the birth center and the neighboring Harmony Health Family Resource Center, said the idea is to give mothers an option besides a hospital room when it's time to deliver.

"Their birth informs their future relationship with their children," said Farrell, a licensed physician's assistant. "Childbirth is a natural process that's become medical-ized, and it's not natural anymore."

Whether in one of the three birthing rooms, or in the bathroom where they can give birth in a tub or shower, women who use Baby Buddies will be encouraged to give birth more on their terms. They can have help from midwives or doulas, but won't find doctors or epidurals, Farrell said.

Fonda Shaw, a certified nurse's midwife who was trained with the birth center in mind, said she has been present at hundreds of births as a nurse in Sacramento.

"It's very different, but it's a whole new experience," she said Tuesday, as Farrell hosted an open house for the newly opened center.

Farrell said she wanted to open the birth center partly because of the high rate of Cesarean-section pregnancies at Fremont-Rideout Memorial Hospital, as much as 30 percent. Funding from First 5 Yuba helped get it off the ground.

By emphasizing natural childbirth, and taking Medi-Cal patients, a relative rarity for birth centers, Farrell said, she hopes to see that number fall.

"It's probably not going to pencil out financially," she said, though within the first year, she believes as many as 20 women might give birth at Baby Buddies a month. "It's beginning a social movement."

Kay Nelsen, a U.C. Davis Family Medicine physician working with Baby Buddies, said the philosophy of natural childbirth matches what family doctors believe works best for all patients.

"It's part of the normal lifecycle," she said, later adding, "I think it's a real shame women on Medi-Cal often have less choices for health care."

As she led tours of the center, Farrell said there would be a long list of criteria for those who wanted to use its services. Shaw said the first babies could be delivered there at the end of next month.

Though a birth center might be a new concept in Yuba-Sutter, Farrell believed good ideas gain acceptance anywhere.

When she first began lactation classes 10 years ago, she recalled, some women would feed their babies soda out of a baby bottle.

"Now the norm is breast feeding," she said. "I think this will become the norm."

CONTACT reporter Ben van der Meer at 749-4786.