BANGOR, Maine — A Bangor mother of three, Cori Skall was seeking a different experience for the birth of her fourth child when she decided to explore midwifery.
“I really liked the idea of having a little more say over [my delivery]. I wanted to be a little more empowered and less drugged up,” she said Friday.
Skall said many of her mom and mom-to-be friends feel the same way. That’s why she was excited to learn that Bangor soon will have its first birth center outside a hospital, Close to Home Birth Center.
Christine Yentes, a certified professional midwife with more than two decades of experience, closed a deal Friday on the former Cakes by Jan building at 214 Hammond St., an 1888 brick structure that also once housed one of the city’s fire stations.
Trained in Boston and Maine, Yentes is a founder of First Light Community Midwives in Belfast, a midwifery service she runs with associate Julie Havener. She also has maintained a Bangor office for several years serving pregnant women who want to give birth at home.
“I became a midwife as the result of my own births and wanting to keep normal physiological birth available for women,” she said during an informal gathering Friday at the birth center’s future home.
“This will be for low-risk women. It’s for people who are looking for a natural birth. It’s going to have a home-like environment,” she said. “I think it’s more of a hands-on personalized continuity of care” than is available in hospital settings.
Over the next several months, the building will essentially be gutted and renovated and made as energy-efficient as possible, but the integrity of the two-story brick building will be preserved, she said. The work will be done by her husband, Jonathan Fulford, owner of Artisan Builders.
Her goal is to open early next year.
“There’s going to be two birthing suites upstairs. We’ll have the option of a water birth tub and a shower and a little kitchenette. It’ll be private and it will be cozy and comfortable,” said Yentes, who lives in Monroe.
“Midwifery is becoming a bigger integrated part of maternity care and I think that that’s the … forward-moving trend, also,” she said.
The center will provide prenatal, birthing and postpartum care and other medical services pregnant women and new mothers require, she said.
While health insurance does not cover midwifery services, it will cover the facility fee, she said. Insurance coverage for midwifery services, however, could be available later if the center employs certified nurse midwives, whose services are covered.
Though she declined to say how much it will cost to have a baby at the new center, she did say it would be “much less expensive” than a vaginal delivery at a hospital.
According to a 2013 nationwide market study, the average cost for a vaginal delivery at a hospital for those with commercial health insurance was $18,329 in 2010.
Yentes said she chose Bangor for the center because of its large catchment area and because her market research indicated that the service will be welcome. The only comparable centers are in Topsham and Bridgton, she said.
As more women seek out alternative birthing options, new medical guidelines overseas are challenging the long-held belief that a hospital bed is always the best place to deliver. The United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence concluded after a review of research that healthy women with low-risk pregnancies are safer giving birth at home or in a midwife-led unit than in a hospital under an obstetrician’s care. Still, babies born at home, particularly to first-time mothers, face risks that may be avoided in a hospital setting.
Though Skall’s baby is due in October, months before the Bangor birth center opens, she’s pleased that it will be available to other women in the area.
“When we heard about it, I was really excited because I’m plugged in with a lot of moms in our community and everything that I’ve ever heard is that ‘I have to travel to Portland or the midcoast or Ellsworth for anything like this because there’s nowhere set up to facilitate something that would be less [clinical],’” she said.
“There are a lot of women in the area who opt for the only option that they have, that being a hospital, but they’re not high-risk and they’re fairly healthy,” she said. “I think that they would be suited very well for another option and I think they’d be really excited about this.”
For information about Close to Home Birth Center, call Yentes at 323-2462, email closetohomebirthcenter@gmail.com or check out the center’s Facebook page.