At eleven o’clock one autumn night in 1976, an earnest young man showed up at the door of Joni Dawning’s house in McPherson, Kansas.  Joni was a twenty-one-year-old single mother who tended bar at the local Best Western. The young man was desperate. His partner was in labor, and their midwife, on her way from Texas, was barely at the Oklahoma border and would never make it in time.  Would Joni please come and be with them for the birth?

Joni wasn’t a midwife then, but she had an unshakable belief  that  women ought to be giving birth at home, a notion not in vogue in small-town Kansas in the mid-70s. But she had spoken out about it at a LaLeche League meeting a few nights before, where the young man’s very pregnant partner was in attendance.  Joni had never assisted with a birth, but when your life’s calling has found you, and is standing on your front porch looking you in the eyes, what can you say but yes? 

She said yes. 

She fetched clean towels.  She went with the young man, and smiled quietly and nodded as the baby was born into the world.  She was there, she believes, as a witness.  The mother required no intervention.  She needed empowerment. 

Joni tells this story as we sit in her living room on a March day in Eugene, Oregon, the weather an endless tangle of sun, clouds and rain.   She sits with her legs curled beneath her in a high-backed chair.  She gestures with her hands as she talks.  Occasionally, her hands wander to her hair, which is graying and falls in a wavy curtain just past her chin.  It frames her angular but delicate features.  Behind her, mounted on the wall, is the figure of a woman woven in sticks – voluptuous and pregnant, the figure appears to be joyously dancing through space.  Joni and I drink tea as her daughter, Amelina, a coltish, dark-haired eight year old, listens.  This scene, women talking about birth with the next generation listening in, could have taken place two hundred years ago.  Or five hundred years ago.  Or a thousand. 

At fifty, Joni has delivered more than four hundred babies in her life as a midwife.  Her formal education was limited. The midwifery school she attended, briefly, was eventually closed because its proprietor falsely told students the institution was accredited.  It was not.  But Joni had left before then, deciding against earning credentials.  To Joni, the midwifery certificate offered by various national organizations came with a list of absolute rules, rules she generally abides by anyway.  But  when a practitioner has a protocol she must follow, she is guiding her clients along a dictated path.  And Joni’s philosophy is based on clients guiding the midwife along the path, and in that subtle difference there is power. 

All of Joni’s births have been successful, and few of her clients have ever had to be brought to the hospital. “Everything I learned about my practice I learned from giving birth,” she tells me.  Her voice is deep and mild but has the resonance of a Tibetan gong.  Joni knows about giving birth.  She’s done it four times, twice unassisted in a middle-of-nowhere cabin in the mountains of southern Oregon.  This woman doesn’t mess around.

Joni had begun educating herself about midwifery and home births before the young man ever knocked on her door that autumn evening.  When she was nineteen, she had her first child, Megan, in a hospital in Kansas.  Although her baby was beautiful, birthing in the hospital left Joni bereft.  There was a disconnect to the experience, an unexpected letdown.  Essential elements were missing from her hospital birth:  the raw reality of the act, the connection to the mystery of life.  She would not let that happen again. 

Within a month of Megan’s birth, Joni’s marriage ended.  She and a friend hitchhiked to Washington State, where Joni studied, briefly, at Evergreen State College and then worked as a community organizer at a VISTA women’s shelter while she and Megan lived on her $275 a month salary.  She became an advocate for the pregnant women there, often taking them to prenatal appointments and ultimately attending their births.  Joni was able to compare hospital births with home births.  She found the home birthing experience decidedly more magnetic – no pitocin, no epidurals, nobody barking orders to “push!” – and began to study midwifery in earnest, joining a group with eight other women.  It was a time when books like Ida May Gaskin’s “Spiritual Midwifery” and Suzanne Arms’ “Immaculate Deception” were coming out, urging women to reclaim the birth experience.  Women were having parties where they studied each others’ cervixes.  Joni and her group devoured the books and breathed in the zeitgeist of the time. 

Nowhere was this difference between hospital and home births more pronounced than in Joni’s own experiences.  After leaving VISTA, she moved to southern Oregon with her new partner, Paul.  The young couple lived the homesteading, off-the-grid lifestyle, building their own cabin and the road that led to it. The one midwife in the area practiced according to the model laid out in obstetrics textbooks, which meant shaved pubic hair and controlled breathing.  And Joni, pregnant again with her second daughter, Quail, was not about shaved pubic hair and controlled breathing.  “It was a no-brainer that we were going to do the birth ourselves,” she tells me.