Interview with Marsha Jackson, CNM

Rachel Wolford interviewed Marsha Jackson for the Spring 1995 Birth News, the newsletter BirthCare & Women's Health

Ever since she was a little girl, Marsha Jackson wanted to be in the medical profession. Growing up in her parents' apartment building in northern New Jersey, she cared for a succession of neighborhood cats and dogs and thought she might like to become a vet. But she was drawn to nursing too. Her grandmother ran a nursing home, and she grew up seeing nursing care. Her exposure to newborns and birthing women began early: her mother was a labor and delivery nurse. During those times when her mother could not find a baby sitter, she brought Marsha along with her to work at the hospital.

Marsha studied nursing at Howard University and in 1974 was in the second class to graduate from their BSN (Bachelor of Science in Nursing) program. From there she went to work in the newborn nursery of the now-closed Freedman's Hospital in D.C.

The first of Marsha's five children was born at Columbia Hospital for Women in 1975. After her maternity leave, she worked in the newborn and maternity units at the Howard University Hospital, where she also began teaching childbirth classes at the hospital and became a certified instructor through ASPO. Soon Marsha began assisting women giving birth at home as a birth assistant with the Maternity Center and with Family Birth. Meanwhile, she continued working in the neonatal nurseries at the Howard University Hospital. By 1980, she was a nurse-clinician, in charge of all the childbirth and maternity patient education at the hospital, as well as doing in-service education for the staff itself.

Marsha wanted something more. With the encouragement of the midwives for whom she worked as a birth assistant, she applied and was accepted into the Georgetown University Master's Program in midwifery. She began her studies just as her third child was born. Earning the master's and caring for her new daughter and two older children was "hard work, that I took day by day." In December of 1981, she graduated from the program and helped start an adolescent pregnancy program along with Kay Boyer, CNM. Marsha was the first midwife to have hospital privileges and to do a birth at Georgetown University Hospital, despite some opposition by a few members of the staff. She also delivered babies at D.C. General Hospital. At the same time, even before she had passed her board examinations, women who knew her through the childbearing community began to call her, asking her to do homebirths for them. Soon she had her own solo homebirth practice, catching one to five babies a month.

In 1987, with her fifth child growing out of toddlerhood, Marsha attended a midwifery convention in Florida where she ran into Alice Bailes, a former classmate at Georgetown whom she had known since her days as a childbirth educator. Alice was looking for a partner for a home birth practice. After much thought, discussion with her family, and prayer, Marsha and Alice founded BirthCare in May of 1987.

Marsha lives with her family on fifteen and a half acres, in southern Maryland, where she raises Samoyeds, and keeps two goats and a cat. She is also active in the St. Paul Baptist Church. She has a strong Christian faith and feels that midwifery is a ministry to which the Lord has called her.

With the births of her five children, as well as in her professional practice, Marsha has experienced first-hand the different possibilities for giving birth: in a hospital, birth center and at home. "One can have a wonderful birth in the hospital," she says, "but few, if any, can compare to a home birth. An out-of-hospital birth is an empowering experience for the mother and the family."

Out-of-hospital births, whether at home or at the birth center, make the birth a family event and not a medical procedure. At home, on their own turf, the family and the mother are more comfortable. And a woman laboring in a comfortable, comforting environment labors more efficiently. The family controls the environment of the birth at home. But a home birth requires more material preparation on the part of the family, whereas the birth center provides a setting already prepared for a birth.

Birth-center births, Marsha feels, are not much different from home births. "It is like the mom is having the baby at our house. (In a home birth, we are guests at a family's home.) What I don't like about birth center births sending the mom home, usually within four hours of the birth. It is much nicer [at home births] to tuck Mom, Dad, and Baby (sometimes big brother or sister too) In the "bed, and then tip-toe out the door with the Birth Assistant."