On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice and untravelable. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman's terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really dead when the midwife operated. At some point within minutes of what the narrator's mother believed had been a stroke, after she concluded the cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, the midwife screamed for the asst. and the husband to grab the sharpest knife in the house. In Midwives, the author chronicles the events leading up to the trial of Sibyl Danforth, a respected midwife in the small Vermont town of Reddington, on charges of manslaughter. The author takes the reader through the intricacies of childbirth and the law.
***Rated 3/5. Overall, I enjoyed this book, it being the first that I had read by this author. I found it amazing that the author is a man, he portrayed a woman's thoughts very well. Although as a nurse, I don't agree with homebirthing babies, it was an interesting concept the way it was portrayed. I found the shocking thoughts of the midwive at the end of the story very thought-provoking.
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