Scott and Christel Koedel hold their daughters,
Kaia, born Aug. 3, and Katniss, age 18 months.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Paula Detwiller
On the afternoon of Friday, Aug. 3, while her Ocean Ridge neighbors tended their gardens, ran errands, and sunbathed around their pools, 34-year-old Christel Koedel was inside her house having a baby.
It was just where she wanted to be.
Koedel already had one baby at home — Katniss, born 18 months ago — and now a little sister was on the way.
With assistance and support from a licensed midwife and two student midwives, Koedel labored all morning and into the afternoon until finally pushing out her second daughter, Kaia, at 2:28 p.m.
To say it was “all in a day’s work” would be to sell short the miracle of birth. But clearly, Koedel has this home-birth thing down.
“With Katniss, I basically leaned over a kitchen chair and yelled with every contraction. I stood up the entire time,” she says. “This time I reclined in a warm tub, and it was a more gentle labor. This birth was very calm and quiet.”
Husband Scott Koedel, who was present for both births, is in awe of his wife’s abilities. “She is tougher than me and anyone I know,” he says.
The Koedels represent a growing number of middle- and upper-income couples (he rescues failing businesses, she’s a former international trade specialist) opting not to have their babies delivered in a hospital. Instead, they are choosing home birth or delivery at a birth center, using a midwife for medical assistance and, in some cases, a doula for emotional and physical support.
Midwife student Allison Lynum sits with Christel Koedel
after assisting her in the home birth of her 6 pound, 3 ounce
daughter Kaia in Ocean Ridge. Photo provided
In Palm Beach County, many of those couples are tapping into the services of The Palms Birth House in Delray Beach.
Open for about a year now, the birth center offers midwives and doulas for hire, natural childbirth classes, prenatal care, in-house lab tests, ultrasound exams, massage — even an upscale mother-and-baby boutique. Two tastefully appointed birthing rooms await those who choose to deliver there.
Business has been so brisk, say birth center owners Miriam Pearson-Martinez and Lorie McCoy, they’ve had to start a waiting list.
“Stereotypically, people envision the kind of woman who would choose a midwife-assisted natural birth to be a little hippie-dippie, a little lower income — but that’s not the reality,” says McCoy, a certified doula. “Our clients are local business professionals, doctors, attorneys. They’ve got time and money on their side, and they spend time researching this option and then come to us because they don’t want the same old same old.”
“Usually it’s the second-time moms who say ‘I never want to do that again’ after giving birth in a hospital,” says Pearson-Martinez, a licensed midwife who says she has helped deliver more than 600 babies, including Katniss Koedel. “But now we’re seeing a huge increase in first-time moms choosing this.”
Obviously, pregnant women at high risk for complications are encouraged to deliver in a hospital. But studies show that for a normal, healthy pregnancy, little medical intervention is necessary and home birth is safe.
It’s also cost-effective. McCoy says countries in which low-tech, midwife-assisted births are common spend far less money on maternal health care and have lower infant and maternal mortality rates.
Koedel, who did a mountain of research before deciding on home birth, says the out-of-pocket cost of having Kaia at home was roughly the same as an insurance-covered hospital birth would have been after paying the deductible: about $5,000.
But cost was never a deciding factor, she says.
“I didn’t want to be hooked up to a fetal heart monitor, which confines you to bed. I wanted to have control over my environment — wear what I wanted, be allowed to eat and drink throughout labor, and be less likely to end up with a C-section or some other intervention.”
After two home births, Scott Koedel still thinks the whole experience is a little surreal.
“You wake up in the same bed you were in the night before, just the two of you — and here you are a few hours later, laying there with this new little life,” he says.
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