5 Reasons People are Traveling from New York City to Midwives of New Jersey for their Birth

We have seen a steady increase in the number of people willing to drive away from the City for their Obstetric care. At first glance, this seems strange because everyone knows that NYC has some of the best medicine in the world. People go there for specialized care that cannot be had anywhere else in the country (and even the world). But sadly, birth is treated like a medical illness in most New York City hospitals. Very little is offered in terms of birth choices and provider options.

Midwives of New Jersey is the bastion of birth choice in New Jersey. We affirm that every pregnant person is different and we all birth differently. Our goal is to individualize our care to each client as much as possible. We wish for our patients to feel heard and loved. That is the biggest reason we attract families from Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and New York City.

Here are 5 of the top reasons families are traveling from NYC to Midwives of NJ for their Birth:

1.  We Offer the Greatest Birth Choice

Choice of Birth Site

Midwives of New Jersey offers families the choice of hospital, home birth or birth center birth.  Many people have very little understanding of what it means to choose their birth site because most women have no choice but to have a hospital birth.

Water labor & Waterbirth

New York City has virtually no hospitals with tubs, water labor/birth. You will be hard pressed to find a tub in which to labor and water BIRTH is non-existent. Barbara Harper of Waterbirth International says “As far as I know, there is a hospital in the Bronx that offers waterbirth and one on Long Island, but as for Manhattan, no one is doing them.”

If you want an option to use a birth tub to cope with the discomforts of labor, come to New Jersey!  Midwives of New Jersey are the area’s leading expert in Waterbirth, delivering over 1000 waterbabies without a single complication related to the birth taking place in the water! In fact, over 40% of our clients choose to have Waterbirths.

Vaginal Birth After Cesarean

Most people are not given the choice of giving birth vaginally after a cesarean section in New York or New Jersey. Access to a true attempt at a Vaginal Birth After Cesarean Section (VBAC) is rare. In most cases, the woman is told VBAC is too dangerous and her repeat cesarean is scheduled.  Midwives of New are pleased to offer VBAC as an option to our clients at Morristown Medical Center.

Choice of Labor Comforts/Labor Support

At the MNJ, we believe it is essential to help prepare our clients for labor by educating at each prenatal visit, offering childbirth classes and a labor rehearsal class, and offering tools & methods to help manage labor.

• Unlike most providers, our Midwives stay with you in labor, we always have a second call Midwife for busy days
• Our Midwife Assistants act as your doula and photographer
• You can deliver in the hospital, birth center or at home
• Water immersion for labor pain and for giving birth
• Trial of labor after cesarean
• Epidural at hospital
• Nitrous Oxide at birth center and hospital

2.  Midwives Provide Superior Care & Personal Autonomy

Not only are Midwives the solution for the very poor birth outcomes in New Jersey and New York, but we are the best providers for superior pregnancy and birth experiences. If you want things most people are denied in labor like EATING, MOVING, and DECISION-MAKING, you will want to seek a practice similar to ours.

To this day, despite much evidence proving the benefits of honoring physiologic birth practices, almost all hospitals disregard it. People are still given only ice chips, lying flat on their backs and being told what to do like they are 5-year old children.

Midwives are the answer to many of the issues surrounding childbirth. Our professional philosophy is evidence based and strongly rooted in normal physiology and personal autonomy. We recognize your intrinsic human and medical rights to be an active participant in your birth and act accordingly.

Unfortunately, there are not nearly enough Midwives to instigate the sorely needed change in American Obstetrics so we must also push for protocol changes in our own institutions, open the door for doula involvement and push for change in the laws surrounding Midwifery practice in our individual states. And frequently, women need to pass many hospitals on their way to one of the few places that acknowledge their autonomy.

Midwives in private practice are preferable      

When Midwives are employed by physicians or medical centers, they are rarely given the freedom to practice Midwifery. This means their clients will have fewer birth choices.  Midwives have more control over (office practices) the way they provide care when they are employed by Midwife-owned practices. Hospitals always want more patients/births so to entice more business, they often will allow private practice Midwives and their clients more control (are frequently allowed a little more control) over their deliveries than the patients of Midwives who are hospital employees. There are very few private Midwifery practices in New York city and even fewer places for those Midwives to employ normal birth practices.

Midwives of NJ is a private Midwifery practice. We have 7 Midwives in our current practice and will eventually have another 5-7 in our new practice opening in Guttenberg at the end of 2023.

Looking around for a Midwife in New York City https://www.birthmattersnyc.com/midwifery-services  https://www.nycmidwives.org/find-a-midwife

3.  We Offer Birth Center births, New York City Does Not.

We have attended births at Our Birthing Center ever since it opened in 2018. After years of attending homebirths, Midwives of New Jersey was uniquely poised to care for women in this out-of-hospital setting. Managing labor and birth without the help of a large hospital staff, Pitocin augmentation, epidurals, an operating room and a NICU requires a particular skill set and knowledge base that many hospital-based Midwives do not possess. An additional asset to choosing MNJ is when our clients do transfer to the hospital either during pregnancy or during labor, we still provide labor care and catch the babies because we have hospital privileges.

Freestanding birth centers are as close to a hospital birth as you can get without being in a hospital and as close to a homebirth as you can get without being at home. Striking that perfect balance, families choose birth center births so they can have a comfortable birth near a hospital.

The American college of Obstetricians and Gynecologists endorse birth centers

Data has long demonstrated that hospitals and accredited birth centers are the safest places to give birth

https://www.acog.org/news/news-releases/2020/04/acog-statement-on-birth-settings

The following excerpt from Neelu Shruti’s blog may not be an entirely accurate picture of 2023 but it is a good history of Midwifery and birth centers in NYC:

NYC does not have birth centers. Brooklyn Birth Center In 2001, NYC had four free-standing birth centers and multiple within-hospital birth centers or midwifery-led care floors. Now, New York State has just three out of the 345 birth centers in the United States, with just two in New York City, both located in Brooklyn. In Downtown NYC alone, the loss of midwifery and birth services has been staggering: SoHo Midwives closed in 2002; Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center closed in 2003; St. Vincent’s closed in 2010; Mt. Sinai closed their in-hospital birth center in 2018; Beth Israel closed its midwifery unit in 2017; Bellevue closed it’s birth center in 2007 and slashed it’s 24-hour midwifery program in 2017; and NYP Downtown’s birth center was a short-lived and failed experiment. Now, we are left with The Brooklyn Birth Center and Birthing Center of New York, both in Brooklyn, as well as just 20 independent home-birth midwifery practices to handle the immense number of requests for out-of-hospital births. https://neelu-shruti.medium.com/the-problem-in-new-york-5bd2e83c0578

A new birth center –Our Birthing Center on the Hudson in Guttenberg- opens toward the end of 2023. If you want choices for your birth, a birth center is a good place to consider. The time to travel across the bridge or tunnel is worth every minute for you and your baby to receive the respectful care that you deserve.

4.  We are Affiliated with the Best Hospital in New Jersey for Low-Intervention Birth

Midwives of New Jersey has offered low-intervention births at Morristown Medical Center for the past 13 years. The hospital is very supportive of true Midwifery care. We have policies that support:

• Intermittent fetal monitoring. After about 20 minutes on the monitor demonstrating fetal well-being, Midwives can monitor the fetal heart rate by intermittent auscultation. That is simply listening to the heartbeat every so often rather than trying to capture every single beat of the baby’s heart. Intermittent auscultation is a very safe way to monitor babies when the labor is proceeding on its own and allows the laboring person to move freely most of the time
• Water labor and birth. The Midwives of New Jersey have attended hundreds of water labors/births at MMC.  Many clients use the tub for pain management for some part of their labor even if they do not ultimately give birth in the water.
• Eating and drinking in labor. The leaders of MMC’s labor and delivery unit understand that there is no medical evidence to support starving women in labor.
• Wireless fetal monitoring that is waterproof so patients who require continuous monitoring (like women planning a Trial of Labor After Cesarean, TOLAC) but are otherwise having a normal labor, can move about their room and use the tub.
• Our clients can try for a Vaginal Birth After Cesarean with the full support of the hospital staff and our consulting physicians. We have a 70-80% VBAC success rate. We have caught many VBAC waterbabies!

5.  Midwives of New Jersey has Ancillary Programs & Services to Facilitate your plan for your Pregnancy, Birth and Postpartum.

Prenatal Programs & Services

• Complimentary consult with our Wellness Advisor
• Childbirth classes – full-series, refresher, breastfeeding, BabyCare, Labor Rehearsal
• Our online store The Essential Market for Midwife-approved supplements
• Massage Therapy
• Chiropractic Care  

Postpartum Care & Ongoing Support

• 1-week and 6-week postpartum visits
• MotherCare classes
• Lactation Circle (consulting)
• Playgroups
• Mom’s Night Out
• Well Woman Care

We invite you to consider the Midwives of New Jersey for your next baby. We are proud of the work we do and endeavor to be the best Obstetric providers in the area. Attend our online orientation and then register for a meet and greet if you have more questions.