Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton reports on the business beat at The Denver Post. Previously, she worked in Washington, D.C., as a Capitol Hill reporter at Bloomberg Government, covering agriculture and trade policy. Megan received her master's in mass communication from Arizona State University.
Eileen Fruithandler, left, used a midwife 30 years ago in Florida to have a home birth for her daughter Danielle Fruithandler, right, pictured on Oct. 4, 2023. Now they both live in Denver and were photographed at Eileen’s home. Eileen Fruithandler delivered her second child at home with a midwife in 1992 – an era when she and her late husband faced pushback from loved ones about the decision.
In Colorado, midwives are seeing the same rise in interest in their services, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic. The practice is growing because it offers individualized “high-touch” care, a more flexible timeline for birthing, a comfortable setting, access to postpartum care and a cheaper alternative to hospitals, Anderson-Tarver said.
She’s also noticed “a movement” in the insurance sector to offer expanded coverage of home births over the past few years.program for low-income health coverage, covers home births performed by enrolled physicians or certified-nurse midwives, but it doesn’t enroll or reimburse certified professional midwives as providers, said Adela Flores-Brennan, the state’s Medicaid director.
She’ll let clients curate their environments by playing music, inviting loved ones to support them or taking naps with their partners throughout the process. “Nothing went right,” Ford said. “As a first-time mom, I didn’t really get the voice that I felt like I deserved.” With her third child, she qualified as a “very high risk” pregnancy at the age of 33, given her two C-sections, but pled with her doctor for a vaginal birth at the hospital. He gave her one hour to push her daughter out before they opted for another surgical delivery.During her fourth pregnancy at 35 years old, she went to Anderson-Tarver for a home birth, although her relatives and in-laws were nervous about the decision.
And they’re choosing home birth for different reasons – because they were born at home themselves, were left “deeply traumatized” by hospital births or suffered losses like miscarriages. “We have done births for just about nothing for clients who are deeply in need,” Venn said. “We just try to meet people where they’re at.”
Afterward, she dealt with postpartum depression, which went undiagnosed for months. Fruithandler wanted her next birth at 34 years old to go differently. When Fruithandler began to deliver her daughter in her bed, the midwife caught a life-threatening problem: The cord had wrapped around the baby’s neck. She used her fingers to unwrap it as the infant’s head popped out.
She points to more people enrolling in their midwifery program over the years, as it moved to a “more accessible” hybrid model that lets educators teach students in rural communities, different states and more., serves three rural counties in southwestern Colorado – Montezuma, La Plata and Archuleta – along with San Juan County in northwestern New Mexico. She regularly drives one hour in three different directions to reach her clients.
“There’s been a lot of propaganda for many decades that a hospital’s safe and midwives are untrained and not experienced and don’t know what they’re doing,” she said. “There’s so much fear around birth,” she said, but, “truly, emergency C-sections happen really rarely.” A month after Wolfe married her husband Spencer last July, she attended a hot yoga class with dimmed lights and lit candles, and thought, “This is how I want to bring a baby into the world” – not yet realizing she was already pregnant.
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