St. Peter's To Open Midwife-Focused Birth Center In September

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ - This September, a brand-new birthing center is on track to open at Saint Peter's University Hospital in New Brunswick, where the emphasis will be on midwives, women laboring freely in the comfort of hotel-like suites and low-intervention births — all on the same campus as a nationally-ranked neonatal unit and teaching hospital.

The Mary V. O'Shea Birth Center is a 4,100-square-foot birth center that is expected to open in early September at Saint Peter's, located on Easton Avenue. It is a separate birth center, with its own entrance, but it is connected to the hospital via an elevator.

"This is a place where women with low-risk pregnancies can be under the care of a midwife and have a holistic birth experience," said Joanne Cunha, 39, one of the midwives on staff at Saint Peter's. "But if something comes up, we are in close proximity to the labor and delivery rooms and the operating room four floors up. We provide all the comforts of a home birth, but we have all the resources of a hospital available should anything go awry."

Saint Peter's has also dramatically increased their offerings in midwifery care in the past few years: Cunha was the first midwife brought on staff two years ago, and she's since been joined by two more midwives. The midwife team delivered 63 babies at Saint Peter's in 2018, and this year they are anticipating to exceed 100 births at the hospital.

Saint Peter's decided to open the center in response to the increasing number of American women who choose to deliver with a midwife.

"I've been a midwife for 13 years and I definitely see more and more women choosing this option, to deliver with a midwife," said Cunha. "I've had physicians approach me and ask if I know midwives. And we get a lot of women who are transferring to Saint Peter's because we offer the midwife care. Midwives are increasingly being seen as a valuable asset."

The number of home births is also on the rise.

"I wouldn't have chosen a home birth for myself," said Cunha, who is herself a mother. "In that type of situation, you don't know what's going to come up. You don't know if the baby's heart rate will drop. You don't know if you're going to have a post-partum hemorrhage after birth. These are things you cannot anticipate, especially with a first baby, and they can be life threatening. By the time you are calling 911 and waiting for an ambulance, those are precious minutes lost."

There are a number of birth centers dotted across New Jersey, but none are physically located on a hospital campus. Few are even affiliated with a hospital.

"We recognized that there are women in our community who want to have an alternative birth experience," said Michelle Lazzarotti, senior director of marketing at Saint Peter's. "So for those low-risk women, it only made sense for us to provide this home-like environment on a hospital campus."

The Mary V. O'Shea Birth Center will have three rooms, all decorated to look more like hotel rooms rather than a hospital. They have queen-sized beds (not hospital beds), and women can labor in the large Jacuzzi tubs or while walking freely around the room or the birth center. The center also has non-hospital lighting. (Note: If you are looking for a water birth, women cannot actually deliver their babies in water at Saint Peter's; only Morristown Medical Center, run by Atlantic Health, is allowed by law to permit water births in the state.)

"We're already doing a lot of this now with our patients," said Cunha. "Letting them be up and moving, doing intermittent fetal monitoring and sitting on the labor ball during labor. We're also not putting IVs on everyone. So women can basically be as wire-free and mobile as possible."

For low-risk pregnant women, natural birth is the goal at the center. But childbirth can also be a dangerous, complicated process. Saint Peter's neonatology department (that's NICU for premature babies), located four floors up, was ranked by U.S. News & World Report as 34th out of the top 50 neonatal units in the United States. It was the only hospital in New Jersey to make that list of the top 50.

Saint Peter's is also New Jersey's first state-designated Regional Perinatal Center, which provides care before and after birth to pregnant women who are considered high-risk pregnancies or babies born with serious medical issues.

In addition to the midwives, the birthing center is staffed by nurses and Dr. Carlos Benito, MD, who chairs Saint Peter's Department of Obstetrics/Gynecology (OB/GYN).

Mary V. O’Shea, who died in 2016, was a parishioner of St. Peter’s Church in New Brunswick and a major benefactor of the new birthing center that will bear her name.

Related: Saint Peter's Children's Hospital Top In Nation For Neonatal Care