‘Catching babies’ is not a 9 to 5 job

Each week on Recap, we check in with someone in our region and hear what their work week was like. That assumes they’re near the end of the work week, but, for many, 9 to 5 is not the norm.

“We’re available 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” explains nurse midwife Sarah Robinson. She’s the clinical manager at The Birth Center in Bryn Mawr.

“In general, we have 45 to 50 women due in any given month, which averages out to about two births per day, but it never comes that way. Usually it happens that you’ll have two days with no births, and then a day with six.”

A certified nurse midwife’s medical training is extensive, but the approach is a bit different than an obstetrician’s. “We just have a slightly different frame of reference,” Robinson said. ” We think that pregnancy is, by and large, normal unless it proves itself otherwise. I think a lot of times in allopathic medicine, it’s considered a disease to be treated.”