Early Antecedent

For Birthing Ctr.

The article about the birthing center at Gifford in the December 27^th issue of the Herald I found most interesting.

My own memories of what was once only a dream go back into the early fifties, when my late husband, Dr. Ransom Tucker, had just completed his residency in obstetrics and gynecology and had limited his practice to those specialties. By then he had begun to bring some of the fathers into the delivery room, despite the disapproval of some of his colleagues, and much against the wishes of the then hospital administration.

At the time I was largely unaware of the identity of his patients and definitely unaware of delivery room practices, except as those practices applied to me during the birth of three of our children during the fifties. I was, however, aware of my husband’s frustration that birth had somehow turned into a mysterious happening best left in the hands of professionals and no one else.

He died in 1972, well before the founding of the birthing center which took place more than 25 years after his first attempts to make the birthing experience one for families to enjoy, rather than something that took place between the mother and her doctor and his assistants, while the father (and other family members) worried through the hours in the waiting room.

How much he would have enjoyed being a part of the changing attitudes which allowed the birthing center to come into existence, and of the birthing center itself.

Much of what I know now I have learned over the years from aging women who were once my husband’s patients, expressing their grati-tude for the informal atmosphere that he encouraged in the delivery room. Surely those experiences helped to lay the groundwork for what would become Gifford’s Birthing Center.

Idora C. Tucker

Randolph