At 50, Deb Cohen began feeling constantly bloated and lethargic. A busy law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, the Fells Point resident had delayed her annual visit to the gynecologist. She just figured her body was changing because of menopause.

She was right about that, but didn’t know the half of it: Her symptoms were being caused by a 3.5-pound, 19-centimeter cyst, part of which was cancerous.

“The symptoms were there, I just had no clue,” Cohen says. “No one talks about menopause and what it will be like. My body was changing, and it never dawned on me that it was cancer.”

It was, in fact, Stage III ovarian cancer. So Cohen turned to what she had come to regard as her trusted team of doctors at The Weinberg Center for Women’s Health and Medicine at Mercy Medical Center, where she had been treated multiple times, beginning with the 2009 removal of a lump in her breast. To treat the cyst, she was referred to Neil B. Rosenshein, a nationally renowned ovarian cancer specialist and director emeritus of The Weinberg Center.

“I’ll never forget sitting there pre-surgery listening to him as he read the list of things that can go wrong, tears running down my face, thinking, ‘Okay, I’m signing my life away.’” But there was no one else she would trust more with a scalpel. In June 2014, Rosenshein successfully removed the cyst. “He’s an amazing man,” Cohen says.

Cohen remains close to him to this day, and continues to return to Mercy for her six-month checkups, even after moving to D.C. in 2015.

“I’m the luckiest unlucky person,” she says. “I had great health care, great doctors, and lived within a mile of Mercy—you don’t get any luckier than that.”

Mercy’s center does stand out, however, for blazing the trail.

The Mercy center on which she has relied is part of a historically recent health care trend of dedicated female-focused care—such women’s centers have popped up all over the country, and Baltimore now has more than half a dozen. But they raise the question, why not just go to Marcus Welby General Hospital? Because the need for such targeted care stems from biology.

“We have estrogen receptors on every organ in our body,” says Wen Shen, a gynecologist specializing in menopause medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. “And you’re trying to tell me a man’s body works the same?”

And, as in the case of Cohen at Mercy, Shen says the menopause transition is when a lot of medical conditions start kicking in—issues with heart health, bone health, and brain health.

“These are all related to the lack of ovarian hormones because of menopause,” says Shen. For instance, studies have shown that women suffering from severe hot flashes are more at risk for high blood pressure and heart disease.

“The whole list of every medical specialty you can think of, I can come up with an issue in that specialty that is post-reproductive related,” Shen says.

That’s why, building on the national trend, she’s spearheading the creation of a women’s health center at Hopkins that will focus on post-reproductive years, and looking for funding to make it a reality. “We need to be able to help women specifically. Men have been getting good advice and care, because all the research is based on them. Women have been sort of short-changed when it comes to a lot of their medical care.”

Mercy’s center does stand out, however, for blazing the trail: It’s celebrating its 25th anniversary, making it the oldest dedicated women’s health center in the region. It launched the center in 1994, during a period when hospitals around the country started turning to female patients as a niche in an increasingly competitive and tumultuous market. Mercy polled local women and took cues from the best women’s health centers across the country to develop its own version, eventually investing more than $40 million in the project with the goal of consolidating all the medical services in one location.

Other Baltimore-area medical centers pursued similar concepts, spawning more such women’s centers in the past 25 years (see below), but each boasts different strengths. However, a common motivation is to make health care one-stop shopping for women.

At Hopkins, oncologists have often referred patients to Shen to manage symptoms caused by radiation or chemotherapy. “Then I’ll find out that they have high risk for heart disease, that they have osteoporosis, and I refer them to specialists,” she says.

But that can mean a lot of appointments, often at different locations. And one trend doctors are seeing is that working women are developing some of the same attitudes toward wellness that men have always been blamed for—such as ignoring symptoms, procrastinating, and toughing it out because they’re too busy with work and family.

With the average age of menopause’s onset at 51 (and the average women’s lifespan at 81 years), menopause is hitting at a critical time—often at the high point in careers, when women are caring for their own families and sometimes their aging parents as well.

“Today’s woman is so overburdened it’s very hard for her to do all this,” says Shen of the many appointments required to get holistic care. That’s where a women’s center steps in.

“I’m the luckiest unlucky person . . . I lived within a mile of Mercy.”

“A multidisciplinary center is like a one-stop shop. At 9 a.m. you’re going to see the oncologist, at 10 a.m. the rheumatologist, at 11 a.m. the cardiologist,” Shen explains. “The vision is to make it really efficient for the patient to get the care that she needs. Because if she had to make all these appointments with different doctors located on different campuses, across different months, requiring repeated time off from work—that’s a challenge.”

Besides having different strengths, such health centers can also target different markets. As newer hospitals such as Greater Baltimore Medical Center and MedStar Good Samaritan followed their patients to the suburbs, Mercy doubled down on its urban location on St. Paul Place, hoping to capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of nearby commuters, more than half of which are women.

The move attracted Rosenshein from The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Rosenshein opened the center at Mercy and remains its director emeritus.

The Weinberg Center’s offerings, which include breast care, gynecology, plastic and reconstructive surgery, mammography, and radiation oncology, were originally scattered throughout the Mercy campus. In 2003, the hospital finally brought all the services together under one roof as Mercy cut the ribbon on a state-of-the-art, six-floor facility, made possible in part by a $10-million gift from The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation.

Rosenshein echoes that housing all the services together allows The Weinberg Center to provide patients with holistic care. “Most of the issues we have are interrelated,” he says. “People who have ovarian cancer are at more risk for breast cancer. People who have both have genetic issues that need to be addressed.”

The refocusing has been more than a business decision for the hospital: It goes back to the mission of its founders, the Sisters of Mercy, who opened a refuge for homeless and abused women in Dublin in 1827.

This year, The Weinberg Center hit several milestones, including the 5,000th da Vinci robotic surgery performed by gynecologic surgeon Dwight D. Im, medical director of the Neil B. Rosenshein M.D. Institute for Gynecologic Care at Mercy.

By chance, Deb Cohen’s one-year checkup with Rosenshein was scheduled on the exact anniversary of her surgery. So she decided to celebrate. “I stopped to pick up a bottle of champagne for my anniversary, and I picked him up one, too,” she recalls. “I said, ‘We’re going to be celebrating tonight. I don’t care what your family celebrates, but you should, too.’”

Now, she’s sharing her story to encourage other women to listen to their bodies. “I knew three or four women who [also] got this, one who died from this,” Cohen says. “I look around and think, ‘God, I was lucky.’”

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Several other hospitals in the metro area have created women-centric health centers. Here’s the short list:

→ LifeBridge Sinai Hospital of Baltimore

2401 W. Belvedere Ave.

Part of LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital is home to the Louis and Henrietta Blaustein Women’s Health Center. Opened in 2005, this 24,930-square-foot center consolidated women and infant services and includes 32 labor, delivery, and recovery rooms, two operating rooms, three triage rooms, three post-anesthesia units, and three high-risk/extended stay rooms.

Best known for: Serving the needs of women during labor and after delivery, the women’s health center also houses the Institute for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, which offers prenatal testing and counseling for high-risk pregnancies, diabetes, and genetic problems. The center also houses the Jennifer Gandel Kachura Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, a level III facility for newborns needing specialized care; and nutritional counseling, exercise courses, and other educational resources.

→ LifeBridge Northwest Hospital

5401 Old Court Rd., Randallstown

Equipped with the most up-to-date technology, Northwest Hospital’s Herman & Walter Samuelson Breast Care Center provides women with advanced screening and treatment options for holistic breast health in a spa-like atmosphere. Launched in 2010, the hospital’s Women’s Wellness Center offers obstetric and gynecological services to women alongside general health and wellness resources.

Best known for: One of Northwest Hospital’s centers of excellence, the Samuelson Breast Care Center employs dedicated breast-specialized experts including a radiologist, surgeon, and mammography technicians.

→ The Johns Hopkins Hospital

600 N. Wolfe St. and other locations

Obstetric and gynecological care at Johns Hopkins dates back to 1889, when Howard Kelly founded the department. Today, the center is well-respected in a wide range of areas, from family planning to fetal therapy and gynecologic cancers.

Best known for: Today, The Johns Hopkins Hospital is known for its Endometriosis Center, providing women with cutting-edge solutions for individualized endometriosis care, including minimally invasive and robotic surgery techniques to remove endometrial lesions while maintaining fertility. To treat heart disease, which is the No. 1 killer of women, and which often has different symptoms than those found in men, Hopkins is home to the Women’s Cardiovascular Health Center at the Bayview campus and at Johns Hopkins Cardiology in Columbia. It combines advanced medical treatment with a whole-body approach to preventing and managing heart disease, using a multidisciplinary team of experienced cardiologists with fitness, nutrition, and mental health experts.

→ MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

9000 Franklin Square Dr.

Women’s Health Services at Franklin Square Medical Center offers a full range of obstetric and gynecologic care, staffed with attending and resident obstetrician/gynecologists, sub-specialists in maternal-fetal medicine, nurse midwives, women’s health nurse practitioners, ultrasound technologists, gene counselors, social workers, and registered nurses specializing in women’s health.

Best known for: Delivering more than 700 babies each year, the center specializes in high-risk pregnancy care for mothers and babies with medical problems and other complications. The center offers patients the latest technology and treatment options for regularly scheduled well-women appointments, as well as acute care, contraception, management of Pap smear abnormalities, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, medical and surgical management of abnormal bleeding, including minimally invasive options, and mid-life and menopausal symptom management.

→ University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center

301 Hospital Dr., Glen Burnie

Women’s Services at the Baltimore Washington Medical Center include pediatric care, treatment for a wide range of women’s health issues, and labor and delivery. Its state-of-the-art surgical suite offers da Vinci Robot-assisted, laparoscopic procedures for abdominal or vaginal hysterectomies.

Best known for: The Pascal Women’s Center offers spacious labor, delivery, and recovery rooms with whirlpool tubs, private postpartum patient rooms, and dedicated operating rooms for Cesarean births. The on-site Center for Advanced Fetal Care office, Neonatal Special Care Unit, and childbirth education classes round out resources for growing families.

→ Greater Baltimore Medical Center

6701 N. Charles St., Towson

GBMC provides a full spectrum of women’s health services, including labor and delivery, obstetrics, and gynecology, on the main campus as well as throughout the community, and a level III-B Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Best known for: For women needing close monitoring during pregnancy, the 12-bed Mangione High Risk OB unit, adjacent to the delivery suite, provides specialized maternal-fetal care. It’s one of the only in the region that consolidates all prenatal services, inpatient care, and antepartum testing in one location to promote a seamless continuum of care. Its Division of Urogynecology and Reconstructive Pelvic Surgery includes doctors who are specially trained to diagnose and treat disorders of the pelvic floor. The Uterine Fibroid Center at GBMC is one of only a few centers in Maryland that provides a comprehensive approach to treating fibroids, a condition that affects 77 percent of women.

On a far-from-tropical January day, Kristen Vanneman-Gooding sits
under a poster of a palm tree in the waiting room of her obstetrician’s
office at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC). It is exactly a
week to the day before her scheduled cesarean section, and she is
filled with anticipation. This delivery, she suspects—and hopes—will be
entirely different from her last one.

Five years ago, a pregnant
Vanneman-Gooding came for a routine visit to this very office.
Vanneman-Gooding had stopped in for a checkup of her as-yet-unborn
identical twin boys—conceived through in-vitro fertilization—from Dr.
Claire Weitz, head of GBMC’s Division of Maternal and Fetal Medicine.

The
pregnancy was a troubled one from the start. At 18 weeks, an
ultrasound had shown that the twins were together in an amniotic sac
without a dividing membrane, a condition that is often fatal for one or
both fetuses. “Claire said there was a 50-50 chance that either one or
both would not make it,” says Vanneman-Gooding.

But in the weeks
to come, she and her husband, Ira Gooding, breathed a sigh of relief
when a follow-up ultrasound showed that there were, in fact, two sacs.
Several
weeks later, there was more cause for concern: The twins were
suffering from a “growth discordance,” in which one fetus was
significantly larger than the other. So—as is standard for most twin
pregnancies—Weitz put Vanneman-Gooding under “house arrest” to ensure a
healthy delivery for both fetuses. (“I watched a lot of L.A. Law
reruns,” she recalls.)

Months later, during another ultrasound,
there was more worrisome news: the black-and-white images showed that
one of the fetuses was sluggish. Asked to return the next day to verify
the findings, Vanneman-Gooding did; when the results were the same,
Vanneman-Gooding remembers Dr. Weitz saying, “We’re going to take them
today.”

“We didn’t even have a camera,” Vanneman-Gooding says. “It
was a whirlwind—it was just a matter of fifteen minutes between being
in Claire’s office on the fourth floor, walking down the hall, and
being in the operating room for the C-section.”

Today, those
twins—Duncan and Finnigan, both born the same size—are healthy, happy
preschoolers. And although she suffered a miscarriage several months
before her current pregnancy, Vanneman-Gooding—an assistant teacher at
Lutherville’s Havenwood Preschool Center and part-time office manager
at State Farm Insurance—is relieved that this pregnancy has been so
simple.

“I’ve been able to enjoy this pregnancy more than I did with
the boys,” says Vanneman-Gooding—who herself was born at GBMC 32 years
ago. “I’m so much more relaxed, and knowing what to expect at delivery
time is a load off my mind—I’m not nervous about the surgery. I’m more
concerned about what to pack in my hospital bag.”

It’s hard to believe that as recently as 1930, delivering a child was
the single most dangerous event in a woman’s life: One out of 150
pregnancies ended in the death of the mother (most births occurred at
home).

In the 21st century, standardization of practice—from the
presence of fetal heart monitors (100 percent of the time at GBMC) to
advances in anesthesiology (used by about 85 percent of maternity
patients at GBMC) to the prevalence of pitocin (a synthetic hormone
used to speed up labor) and intravenous fluids—has made giving birth
very safe. In 2003, there were 12.1 deaths per 100,000 live births in
the U.S.; that’s about the same mortality rate as that of women with
lung cancer.

“In terms of the safety of the mother, this is probably
the best it has ever been,” says anesthesiologist Jonathan Hamburger, a
partner of Physician’s Anesthesia Associates, whose group provides all
anesthesia services to GBMC. The constant screening of
Vanneman-Gooding’s first pregnancy is just one example of how
improvements help both mothers and infants.

More babies are
delivered at GBMC than any other hospital in Central Maryland: some
4,500 newborns begin their lives at the hospital each year. (In 2006,
Johns Hopkins Hospital and University of Maryland Medical Center
delivered 3,290 babies combined.)
In the past five years alone,
GBMC has delivered more than 22,200 bundles of joy. The hospital has
been the delivery destination of people from all walks of life in the
region, including former First Lady Kendel Ehrlich. Some satisfied
customers even commute from other states—Kensy Boulware, wife of former
Ravens linebacker Peter Boulware, traveled from Tallahassee, Florida
to deliver the couple’s third child at GBMC last fall.

Ever since
its founding in September of 1965, GBMC (which merged with The Hospital
for The Women of Maryland in Baltimore City and The Presbyterian Eye,
Ear and Throat Charity Hospital) has been known for its outstanding
obstetrical department. In recent years, GBMC has become known around
town as “The Baby Hospital” or “The Baby Factory” for good reason.
Despite the fact that there are numerous other prestigious area
hospitals delivering plenty of babies, GBMC—in the wooded, tony suburbs
of Baltimore—has become a leader for women’s healthcare.

The
physical plant of the 106-acre hospital campus perches atop a swell of
land off of Charles Street; the tranquil campus is often called “The
Hilton on the Hill.” And if the hospital as a whole is the Hilton, the
second floor primarily dedicated to maternal and newborn services, is
the concierge level. In the obstetrics lobby and admitting area, a
hospital volunteer tickles the ivories on a Yamaha piano to soothe the
nerves of anxious family members. The 17 state-of-the-art labor,
delivery, and recovery rooms, known as LDRs, are currently under
renovation—they’ll be redone in a tasteful green and beige palette, and
will feature bamboo flooring.

They’re also thoroughly modern rooms.
There will be wireless internet service (some mothers have been known
to log on to their e-mail servers or check their BlackBerries while
dilating); handy desks to set up and recharge cell phones, laptops, and
other gadgets; and plasma HDTVs. The 48-bed postpartum unit, with
private rooms and a dedicated 11-bed high-risk obstetrics unit, is
adorned in soft soothing colors and floral fabrics.

Since 2000, GBMC
has invested approximately $9.9 million in labor and delivery room
renovations, neo-natal intensive care units, and state-of-the-art
equipment. Cracks Dr. Weitz, who has two grown children: “When I took
the first tour, I said, ‘Gee, it’s almost enough to make me have
another baby.’ I’ve been to other hospitals, and this is about as good
as it gets.”

And the amenities don’t stop there. The Lactation
Station retail store is the only one of its kind on a hospital campus
in Baltimore, and sells everything from fashionable nursing shirts to
breast pumps and nursing pillows. Lactation experts have also set up a
breastfeeding information “Warm Line,” open seven days a week from 6
a.m. to 10 p.m. The Warm Line is headed up by lactation consultant
Marla Newmark, who nursed 12 of her own children (she has 11 surviving
kids).

Additional maternity services through GBMC Boutique include
an on-staff aesthetician who visits the maternity ward to provide
things like hair cuts, manicures, pedicures, and facials; parent
education classes; and doula (or birthing coach) services.

The
official acceptance of doulas—women who provide emotional and physical
support to expectant mothers—by a staid, suburban hospital like GBMC was
a big step for both sides.

“GBMC is known as a traditional
hospital,” says Lanny Dowell, doula coordinator. “It has been
interesting to introduce an age-old concept to new and modern medicine.
A lot of doulas were worried about how the staff at GBMC was going to
take it. Did they think we were going to be dressed in old field garb
and doing voodoo?”

Far from it. “We are known as the Ann Taylor and
Talbot’s doulas,” says Dowell, looking very much the part in a pair of
classic winter-white trousers, black mules, and tasteful top. “We are
trying to merge the two images. We are not this cloaky person in labor
and delivery with heavy incense. Our goal has been to soften and change
the idea of the doula.” The list of doula services—from acupressure to
massage—sounds more like a luxe spa’s offerings than tasks handled by a
birthing coach. GBMC doulas also offer postpartum services, from meal
preparation to infant care to light housekeeping—and even carpooling
older kids to school, should the need arise.

In short, sums up
Victor Khouzami, Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics, “At GBMC,
there is a dedication to obstetrics at every level. This is a maternity
hospital within a general hospital.”

Says Susan Bowen, Clinical
Director of Labor and Delivery, “I joke with Dr. Khouzami that we
should secede from the Union and build our own hospital.”
In some
ways, that’s what’s happened: GBMC’s decision to pour resources into
becoming a major obstetrics center has paid off. Year after year, GBMC
has racked up awards, including a coveted ranking in U.S. News &
World Report’s “America’s Best Hospitals” in 1997 and 2001 for
gynecology, “Best Maternity Hospital” by the readers of Maryland Family
Magazine every year from 2002 through 2006, number one in Obstetrics in
the Central Maryland Region by Maryland Hospital Association every year
between 1995 and 2002, and one of the top 10 maternity hospitals in
the U.S. by Child Magazine (1995). GBMC also has many other claims to
fame, including the first birthing rooms in the state (1978), the first
peri-natal center in Baltimore County (1985), the establishment of the
first Lactation Department in the Baltimore area (1989), and the first
robot-assisted gynecologic surgery at a community hospital in the
mid-Atlantic (2006).

All those awards are not exactly what Ira Gooding is thinking about
as he sits on a blue plastic chair in the hallway outside Delivery Room
1 on the second floor of GBMC.

It’s one week after Kristen
Vanneman-Gooding’s visit to Weitz’s office, and Ira Gooding is dressed
head to toe in disposable navy blue scrubs, and clutches a camera.

“I’m
more relaxed this time,” says Gooding, an Open Courseware Coordinator
at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, “but I want to get in
there and for everything to go well.”

Minutes later, Ira is perched
on a leather stool within a foot of his wife’s head and several feet
away from where his daughter is about to be born. At 66 degrees, the
inside of the operating room feels as cold as the January day outside
(it’s kept cool to prevent germs and bacteria from flourishing).
Vanneman-Gooding is draped in warming blankets, and wears a surgical
cap that brings out the blue in her eyes. Weitz; her first assisting
physician, Dr. Margaret Cyzeski; and a scrub technician congregate
around Vanneman-Gooding’s midsection.

The anesthesiologist, Dr.
Stanislav Malov, tends to the monitors near her head. A circulating
nurse and neo-natal intensive care unit team are on standby.
The
540-watt prism halogen surgical lights flood the room, intensifying the
green of the doctors’ gowns, the silver steel storage cabinets, and
the ruby red blood that blossoms on Vanneman-Gooding’s skin as Weitz
makes her first incision through the skin with a number-10 scalpel.

Obstetrical devices have come a long way, both scientifically and
culturally. In the 17th century, when obstetrical forceps were invented
by Peter Chamberlen, the innovative instrument was such a closely
guarded secret that it was used only when a laboring woman was
blindfolded.

Other primitive practices in the 1940’s through 60’s
included putting women in a “twilight sleep” through a potent cocktail
of morphine and a powerful amnesia-inducing drug called scopolamine.
Freed of their inhibitions—but not their pain—thrashing women were
often strapped to gurneys to keep from hurting themselves. “It was such
a powerful amnesiac, some patients would wake up the next day and not
even know if they had a boy or a girl,” says Hamburger.
“Patients
would run down the hallway stark naked,” recalls Khouzami, who joined
the GBMC staff in 1981 as head of the Division of Maternal Female
Medicine.

Modern obstetrics was still in its infancy (so to speak)
when GBMC opened its doors in September 1965. In the 60’s and 70’s,
recalls Khouzami, “We had labor rooms, delivery rooms, and recovery
rooms. The woman delivered in the labor room with no family or support
services, and she pushed the baby out for hours, and then the baby was
taken to the nursery, and [the mother] was taken to the recovery room
where maybe someone would visit. It was very, very [impersonal].”

“The
husband dropped you off at the door of the labor room,” recalls Bonnie
Lauryssens, a retired nurse practitioner who worked labor and delivery
at GBMC from early 1966 through 2005. “Ashtrays were all in the labor
rooms, doctors would walk in smoking, and women smoked while they
labored. You had to pull bars up the bed because the anesthesia made
them thrash and try to climb out of bed. It all seemed so normal—this
was what we knew.”

Women had no say in the birthing process either.
“There was [a] paternalistic attitude,” recalls Khouzami. “The attitude
was ‘You do it because I know what’s best for you.'”

By the
mid-70’s, as more Americans began to question the status quo on much
conventional wisdom, “Families started to demand to share and have
greater participation in the delivery,” remembers Khouzami. “They said,
‘Don’t shut us out,'” and GBMC was the first hospital in Maryland to
respond to these needs. “We opened the first birthing rooms in the
state of Maryland in 1978, and we included fathers in the process.”

By
the early 80’s, birthing centers—where women delivered through the
help of a midwife and in the absence of a doctor—had sprung up around
Baltimore. GBMC added them and tried to provide families with both the
warm, nurturing feeling they would get in a birthing center and the
technology and backup staff found in a hospital setting. “That’s how we
started changing our thinking to, ‘pregnancy as a natural process,'”
says Khouzami, “and we shouldn’t be intrusive, but we should be there,
should an emergency arise.”

Another trend in the mid-70’s was a
shortened length of stay for mother and child. “It got to the point
where the woman had a baby, took a shower, and went home,” says
Khouzami. “The length of stay kept dwindling.” By the 1990’s, the
average length of stay was 1.7 days.

“There was pressure put on me,”
Khouzami says, “because we thought we were going to go down to 12
hours [from admission to release]. I said ‘Over my dead body. It’s
going to swing back.'”

It did, in 1995: Maryland was one of the
first states to mandate a 48-hour length of stay before the practice
became a federal law under President Clinton.
And then there was the
liberal open-door policy for visiting family members in the LDR. “We
went from having no one in the room in the 70’s, to having to put a
limitation on how many people could get into the room,” says Khouzami.
“By the 90’s, it started to get crowded—I remember one delivery in
which there were twelve people in the room.”

Recalls Lauryssens,
“There were mothers-in-law, fathers-in-law, brothers, sisters,
sisters-in-law, and friends. It got to be a joke that pretty soon they
were going to let the family dog in.” (Now the policy is five visitors
for a traditional delivery, two for a C-section.)

A drape hung near her chest prevents Vanneman-Gooding from seeing the
C-section occur. On the other side of the drape, Weitz is the model of
calm and confidence, and she cuts side to side along the turgid
abdomen, then cuts through the fascia covering the abdominal muscles,
through the peritoneum en route to the thick, muscular uterus. Using
numerous white gauze pads, the team of three stanches the deluge of
blood that pools and pours from Vanneman-Gooding’s body.

Even
though it is possible for Ira to avert his eyes, he watches as Weitz
pulls and probes inside the deep exposed cavity in his wife’s abdomen
and then, using a suction device, eases the crown of the baby’s head out
of the womb.
“Ira, get your camera ready,” calls out the
circulating nurse—and then, baby Wren arrives, about 12 minutes after
the first incision.

“It’s a girl,” says Weitz. “I thought you told me it was a boy—I was all set to say, ‘Three boys, you’re screwed.'”

The
baby is weighed (7 pounds, 6.2 ounces) and evaluated (an APGAR score
of 9—nearly perfect). APGAR—an acronym for activity, pulse, grimace,
appearance, respiration—is a 10-point scale used to provide an
immediate, if rough, status report of a newborn’s health.

While
that’s going on, Weitz cuts and ties Vanneman-Gooding’s fallopian tubes
(a procedure Kristen and Ira had decided to undergo after their third
child), before closing the C-section incision with sutures.

The
circulating nurse methodically counts the instruments—the bladder
blade, the retractors, the sutures, the scissors, the scalpel, the
clamps—three times to ensure that nothing gets left behind in the
patient’s body. Ira snaps a digital photo of their new daughter, and
hands the camera to his wife, which lets her study her beautiful baby
girl for the first time.

On January 22, 2007, Wren Dorothianne
Gooding is logged in the hospital’s official record book at 10:57 a.m.
She’s the 278th baby to be born at GBMC this year; Kristen will return
home four days later.

Anesthesiologist Malov offers a little comic
relief. “How soon before there are no more [natural] deliveries?” he
asks, only half joking. “In the next century, babies will probably be
genetically engineered, and there will just be this zipper across
here,” he says, pointing to his abdomen.

Malov’s quip is not entirely in jest. Cesarean section on demand has
become de rigueuramong professional women in modern, industrialized
nations like Japan where, according to Khouzami, the C-section rate is
90 percent. In the U.S., nearly 25 percent of births today are by
cesarean (in 1970, it was only 5 percent).

C-sections offer benefits
(greater control over time of delivery and the removal of some risks
from the childbirth process) with a bit of risk (it is surgery, after
all, and long-term effects may include more postpartum pain and
infertility issues).
“We knew this was coming to the American
workplace sooner or later,” says Khouzami. “We knew the day would come
when women would start asking for it. We are simply coming to a time
when women are saying, ‘This is how I want to deliver,’ but the East
Coast is very slow to change. We’ve had maybe a handful of C-sections
on demand in which women have said, ‘I don’t want to labor. Get me a
date.’ But the trend is not here yet.”

Dr. Weitz seconds the notion.
“There will be an increasing demand for elective primary C-sections,”
says Weitz, who jokes that for some women, natural childbirth means
delivering without makeup. “We are the old prudes,” she says, “the last
to jump on the bandwagon. We are taking it cautiously, but I do
foresee a tremendous increase in patient requests for elective
C-sections. When you really look at it, women can get nose jobs, breast
implants, tummy tucks. Why does society say that we must make them
deliver vaginally? It’s your body and your decision. We respect the
woman’s autonomy.”

To date, the C-section rate at GBMC is about 22
percent—higher than the national average, but misleadingly high because
of GBMC’s high-risk patient population. These include mothers with
multiple births (many of whom medically must deliver through
C-section), older mothers, and repeat patients (at higher risk), and
the fact that the local Catholic hospitals will not perform tubal
ligations (often done in conjunction with C-sections), so many
expectant women choose GBMC to have their C-sections so they can also
get their tubes tied.

So are we professionalizing childbirth—turning
it from an arcane, vague, mysterious process into a regulated,
structured, guesswork-free procedure? 

Susan Bowen, clinical director of
labor and delivery, believes we’re well on our way. “I joke that one
day we are going to get our hours down to nine to five, Monday through
Friday,” she says. “I think the sad part of it is that our whole lives
are planned from the minute we step out of bed in the morning until the
minute we get back in bed at night. And this should be a wonderful
experience for a woman. I worked nights for nine years, and the thing I
enjoyed most was that natural labor that came through the door and you
could be so supportive and really help the woman and her family.”

However
women deliver these days, what’s clear is that they are having a much
greater say in the process. “We try to do what the woman wants us to
do,” says Bowen, “as long as it’s okay with the doctor and within the
policy of the hospital.”
“Years ago, if someone told me they wanted
to breastfeed for two days,” says lactation consultant Marla Newmark,
“I would tell them ‘It’s not worth the work.’ Today, if they tell me
they want to breastfeed for two days, I give them the same amount of
attention as if they planned to do it for a year. We are out to please
the consumer. What the patient wants is what we do.”

Something else has changed too: the patient and the doctor now look a
lot more alike. The influx of women entering obstetrics has caused
sweeping changes in a formerly male-dominated field. At GBMC, there are
57 OB-GYNs: Nearly half are women. “We used to have the token female,”
says Khouzami laughing. “Now we have the token male.” Susan Bowen
agrees. “Women have made a big difference in the field because they have
experienced labor. This is not a disease—it’s a natural process so we
have a lot of influence when it comes to how we want to give birth.
Women are more assertive. You don’t have the little housewife who comes
toddling through the door saying, ‘I’m here. Take me.’ It’s not that
anymore. We have a lot of career women who know what they want, we have a
very educated client base—everyone’s doing research on the internet,
the women take classes, they want what’s best for their baby.”

Claire
Weitz was the only female resident in obstetrics when she did her
training at Johns Hopkins Medical School in the mid-70’s. “When we would
show up [to put on scrubs for the OR], the locker rooms would say,
‘Doctors’ or ‘Nurses.’ I would go into the ‘Doctors’ room, and it would
be the men’s room. We are the majority now. Women have brought a new
perspective. Things become a little more personalized [for the patients]
because they’re often dealing with someone who has experienced
pregnancy—been there, done that, and gotten the T-shirt—but it doesn’t
mean that the men are unsympathetic to pregnant women. Some of the
kindest, most sympathetic men I’ve ever known have been obstetricians,
and that’s a loss for the field because men are not being encouraged to
go into it anymore.”

“When technology first came in, nurses felt
put out,” says Bonnie Lauryssens. “They let technology take care of
their patients—they would go in a room, look at numbers, and write them
down on a chart. Now, it has evolved. The nurses are even more into
the deliveries and are incredibly encouraging. Half the nurses probably
have hemorrhoids from pushing with the patients.”

Khouzami couldn’t
agree more. “I remember as a student, I had a teacher from Virginia
who was a real gentleman,” says Khouzami. “He was part philosopher,
part obstetrician, and he said that a delivery should be ‘by art, not
by force.’ It’s art, not science. Yes, some part of OB is science, but
if you make it purely science, you take all the emotion out of it. You
have to have a solid foundation in science, you have to have
technology, but it has to be tempered by humanity.
“Obstetrics is
more humane than ever. The technology is better than ever. As we move
ahead, we have found this wonderful balance.”