The Bowland Bust — Midwifery in 1970’s America
In the early 1970’s hospital births reached an all-time high of 99.4%, and the obstetrician, rather than the midwife, assumed nearly complete control over what had become an entirely medicalized procedure. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, there was an explosion of new alternative organizations, midwifery practice, and home births, despite it being illegal to practice without a medical license. In this excerpt from ‘Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth’, Wendy Kline documents the story of the Bowland Bust and the role of the ‘hippie midwife’ from the perspective of a legal case.
In the spring of 1974, three women were arrested in an undercover sting operation in Santa Cruz, California, and charged with practicing medicine without a license for their involvement in out-of-hospital births coordinated by the Santa Cruz Birth Center. Over a period of nearly three years, the case moved from the district to the state supreme court, which ruled that pregnancy was a physical condition and that the law prohibited unlicensed persons from “diagnosing, treating, operating upon or prescribing for a woman undergoing normal pregnancy or childbirth.” The decision was clearly a blow to unlicensed lay midwives, as well as pregnant women who sought their care. Over the next fifteen years, some forty to fifty midwives were prosecuted in California. “We were the prosecution capital in the U.S.,” one midwife argued.1
At approximately 10 a.m. on Wednesday, March 6, 1974, midwives running the Santa Cruz Birth Center received a telephone call from the husband of a client who had ostensibly gone into labor at her rustic cabin in Ben Lomond, California. Wednesdays were “clinic day,” the one day of the week when pregnant women came to the center for collective prenatal care. Midwife Kate Bowland stayed behind with her pregnant clients, sending midwife Linda Bennett and apprentice Jeanine Walker on the call. When they arrived at the cabin, with Bennett’s toddler in tow, they expected to find client Terry Johnson huffing and puffing away.
“But it didn’t look like anybody lived there,” Bennett recalls. There were a few people in the house, but no sign of a laboring woman. Someone assured Bennett that Johnson was in the shower, and hearing the water running in another room, the midwives set their birth kits down and assessed the situation. Bennett began to suspect something was off when she opened the refrigerator and found it empty. She checked the cupboards and they, too, were bare. She went to the bed and discovered it was short sheeted. “And that’s when somebody shoved money into my hands.”2 Jeanine ran toward the bathroom to see if Terry Johnson was really in the shower, but a woman sprang in front of her and blocked her from entering.
Moments later, a “motley assortment of state investigators, sheriff’s deputies, and DA’s men poured into the cabin.”3 Assistant District Attorney Bill Kelsay, who would later serve as prosecutor in the case, recalled that the scene was “hilarious. . . . nobody said anything. The women must have wondered what the hell was going on. So finally the sheriff and I said, ‘Will someone please tell the ladies what’s happening?’ ”4 The women were questioned, their birth kits confiscated, and even Bennett’s daughter’s diaper was searched. “I really hoped she’d pooped but she hadn’t,” Bennett later laughed. Within thirty minutes of entering the cabin, Bennett and Walker were arrested and charged with practicing medicine without a license. “I remember saying to them defiantly, ‘do you think this is going to matter? Do you think this is going to make any difference?’ ”5
The arrests did not spring up out of the blue. The State Department of Consumer Affairs and the Board of Medical Examiners were well aware of the growing presence of unlicensed women assisting women with home births, whose primary qualification consisted of attending other home births. The state of California had stopped issuing midwifery licenses in 1949, and only three aging certified licensed midwives still remained by the time of the arrests twenty-five years later, according to Linda Bennett. Despite this, the number of registered home births increased by nearly fifty percent between 1967 and 1972; these numbers may have been significantly higher, as many home births went unreported.6 Legally recognized midwifery had virtually disappeared in the state, but had recently been replaced by a handful of young women determined to reclaim home birth as a civil right.
Unlike the underground movement of abortion activists at the time, these women did not try to hide what they were doing. Fliers, conferences, and the publication of Raven Lang’s Birth Book, a graphic manual of home births taking place in Santa Cruz, publicized their actions. “Because of the system,” wrote Lang in the introduction of her book, “midwifery as practiced in this book is against the law . . . we have become criminals.”7 Although Bennett later recalled fear, confusion, and anger at her arrest, it was hardly a surprise.
(1.) Karen Ehrlich, interview with author, August 6, 2011.
(2.) Linda Bennett, interview with author, September 27, 2014.
(3.) Katy Butler, “Women: Midwifery on Trial in Santa Cruz,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, July 20, 1974.
(4.) Ibid.
(5.) Linda Bennett, interview with author, September 27, 2014.
(6.) Eliza Avellar, nursing consultant for the family health services section of the State Department of Public Health, cited in Kaye Yost, “At Home or in the Hospital?” San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle November 3, 1974.
(7.) Raven Lang, Birth Book (1972; repr., Felton, CA: Genesis Press, 2007), 2.
Wendy Kline is professor and Dema G. Seelye Chair in the History of Medicine in the Department of History at Purdue University. She is the author of Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom and Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave.
