A 100-year-old Germantown home will become a new birth center for Philly families

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

A large house sits far back from the road on East Johnson Street in Germantown, nearly obscured by spindly branches of small trees and clusters of shrubs planted along the property’s front perimeter.

The structure, which is at least 100 years old, has sat in disrepair for several years with a crumbling stone porch, sagging roof and rotting wood floors. But the interior rooms are expansive and bright and pay homage to the area’s historic architecture.

Now, the Philadelphia Midwife Collective hopes to give the space new life by transforming it into a new birth center and community health practice with a target opening date of spring 2027.

The goal is to bring an alternative labor and delivery option to the area as shrinking or closing hospital maternity units and birthing centers have widened gaps in care, said Autumn Nelson, a certified nurse midwife.

It means taking an approach to birthing that has stood the test of time and adapting it for a complicated health care landscape.

“There’re definitely things that are new and different about doing it right now, but it’s midwifery. It is so old, it’s not new,” she said laughing. “We know this is the way to decrease interventions, to have improved maternal health, to have improved neonatal health. Those just are outcomes that happen when you utilize midwifery care.”

Building a non-hospital birthing space

The front door of the house on East Johnson Street leads into a long hallway with vaulted ceilings. There’s a large, spacious room with many windows to the right of the main entrance.

“This will be a huge community space, so this is where we hope to host childbirth classes or other workshops that are helpful to the neighborhood,” Nelson said.

Toward the back of the first floor, workers from Hivemind Construction are busy fitting new windows, repairing floorboards and reinforcing wall studs.

“This is birth suite No. 1,” Nelson said as she stood in a room with a fireplace and long, narrow windows. A second birth suite will be built around the corner. “We don’t have a name for the rooms yet, but it will come at some point.”

These spaces are meant to be home-like environments with the comforts of a bed, some seating, a tub for hydrotherapy and a kitchen that staff and laboring women and their families can use during their stay.

“Feeling like a home space, but, you know, if you open this cabinet, you’ll see lots of medical equipment and things needed to be well stocked for birth emergencies as well,” she said.

Nelson believes the center could facilitate about 20 births a month for people with low-risk, healthy pregnancies.

Clients can be transported to Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital, about 2.5 miles away, for unexpected complications or emergencies that require more intensive care.

Plans for rooms on the second floor include exam areas and offices for other kinds of health care and holistic wellness services, including gynecology, chiropractic medicine, acupuncture and pediatrics.

A shortage of birthing centers, maternity care

Nelson knows that birthing programs and maternity care aren’t money makers, especially for independent midwifery centers where the goal is to guide women through pregnancy and childbirth with as few medical interventions as possible.

Other types of revenue sources are few and far between.

“There aren’t big pools of money set aside for this,” she said. “We need these spaces, but there’s nobody just walking around ready to fund them.”

Nelson has seen these challenges play out at Birth Care Midwifery and Family Health Services in Lancaster and Lifecyle Wellness and Birth Center in Bryn Mawr, some of the oldest independent birth centers in the country.

Lifecyle recently announced it would permanently close by March due to financial pressures and other operational difficulties.

The future birth center in Germantown will remain a much smaller operation, Nelson said, in the hopes of keeping the business financially manageable and sustainable.

The Philadelphia Midwifery Collective also plans to support the new location with a strong fundraising arm. Already, current and former clients have come together to donate and invest in the project.

Leah DiMatteo and her husband, Joel Thomas, were early champions and bought the property in Germantown for the new site. The Mt. Airy couple had home births for their two children under the care of the nonprofit’s midwives and health staff.

“It was just a really peaceful little bubble and it allowed my body to do what it needed to do to birth my children,” DiMatteo said. “We want other women, other birthing people in the community to have similar experiences.”

The organization aims to raise another $150,000 to complete the first-floor transformation and open the center to patients next spring while renovations continue on the second floor.

Her dream, Nelson said, is for more birth centers to open in and around Philly.

“These spaces are sacred,” she said. “And there just aren’t enough.”